Execution Capacity, the Truth Nobody Budgets For | Ep 2: Why Your Training Backlog Is a Business Risk, Not an L&D Problem

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There's a term making its way into corporate training conversations and I think it deserves to be heard far more loudly in our leadership meetings.

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It's called learning debt.

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We all know about technical debt, the accumulated cost of shortcuts and workarounds in software development that eventually has to be paid down, usually at the worst possible moment.

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Learning debt is the same concept applied to training.

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It's the gap between what your workforce actually needs to know and be able to do and what they've actually been trained for.

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And like technical debt, learning debt compounds.

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Every week that a compliance update goes untrained is another week of regulatory exposure.

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Every quarter that sales reps carry gaps in their product knowledge is another quarter of deals lost or won at lower margins.

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Every month that new hires complete an onboarding that doesn't reflect the current state of the business is another cohort starting from a disadvantaged position.

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Today we are talking about learning debt, what it is, how it accumulates, and why solving it is not just an L&D problem, it is a business risk that functional leaders need to own.

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Welcome back to the e Learning Champions Podcast.

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I am Sushmita and this is episode 2 of the series Learning Capacity: The Truth Nobody Budgets For.

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If you are joining us for the first time, I encourage you to go back and listen to episode one where I introduced the concept of learning execution capacity, the core framework we are building this entire series around.

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Today we are looking at the gap between business speed and training function speed from a different angle.

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Specifically, what happens when that gap is allowed to persist?

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What does it cost?

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Who does it cost and who needs to own the solution?

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The conversation I want to have is one that's underrepresented in how functional leaders think about training.

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The frame most apply is training is an L&D function.

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When I need training, I request it, an L&D delivers.

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My job is to tell them what I need.

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Their job is to build it.

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That frame is incomplete in a way that puts functional leaders at a strategic disadvantage because the consequences of training debt land in your P&L, your compliance record, your sales pipeline, and your retention numbers, not in the L&D budget.

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Today we cover 3 things.

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First, what learning debt actually costs is specific numbers by function.

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Second, how it accumulates so quietly that most organizations don't see it until something big breaks.

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3rd, what it looks like for a functional leader to genuinely own the solution and not just delegate it.

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Lets start with the numbers, because I think the quantitative case for taking learning debt seriously is significantly underappreciated in most leadership conversations.

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Talent LMS's 2026 Learning Debt report found that employees who are failing behind on skill development are nearly 6 times more likely to repeat preventable mistakes than those who are keeping up.

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6 times.

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That's not a marginal difference.

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That's a structural difference in operational performance.

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Now these are self reported findings and I want to be transparent about that.

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They are not a controlled study calculating precise financial loss.

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But they are directionally coherent with what operational leaders consistently see when they look closely at the relationship between training completeness and error rates in their own organizations.

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The same report found that 62% of employees use workarounds when they lack the skills, knowledge or training to complete a task.

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Think about that in your own organizational context.

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More than half of your people, when they hit a gap between what they know and what their job requires, invent a solution.

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Sometimes that workaround is fine, sometimes it is a compliance violation, sometimes it is a customer experience failure, and sometimes it is a safety incident.

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Let me put specific cost context around this for the functions I know are represented in our audience in sales.

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Research consistently shows that sales reps who receive structured, timely product and skills training ramp to quota faster and maintain higher quota attainment than those who don't.

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The number varies by industry and product complexity, but the range I see most often in enterprise technology sales is a difference of 2 to 4 months in ramp time and 5 to 15% in quota attainment.

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If you have a sales team of 100 people with an average quota of 1,000,000, a 5% difference in attainment across the team is $5,000,000 in annual revenue.

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The training investment that could have closed part of that gap is a fraction of that number.

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In compliance, the cost of regulatory non compliance drops the cost of compliance training by orders of magnitude.

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Financial penalties, remediation costs, reputational damage, and the management time consumed by regulatory processes.

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These are real costs that appear on real balance sheets.

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I am not claiming that every compliance incident is caused by inadequate training, but inadequate training that fails to reach the entire population on time is one of the most consistent contributing factors to compliance failures that auditors identify.

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In HR and people operations, the cost of poor onboarding is well documented.

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Gallup Research estimates that replacing an employee costs between half and double their annual salary when you factor in recruitment, onboarding, lost productivity and the ripple effects on team performance.

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Onboarding programs that are incomplete, outdated, or delivered in a format that doesn't actually build the capabilities new hires need contribute to early attrition.

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The training cost is a rounding error compared to the turnover cost in marketing and brand.

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When your commercial teams, that is sales, customer success, channel partners, retail staff.

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Can't accurately represent the value of what you are selling because the training didn't keep up with the product or the messaging.

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You lose deals, you erode trust, and you create customer expectations that the product then fails to meet.

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I am laying out these cost frames not to be alarmist, but to make one point clearly.

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The cost of not solving the training execution problem shows up in your numbers and not in the L&D budget.

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In your numbers, which means this is your problem to own, not just to delegate.

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One of the most frustrating things about learning debt is that it accumulates quietly.

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There's rarely a moment when someone announces your training is now inadequate, it drifts incrementally, and by the time it becomes visible, it's usually because something has already gone wrong.

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Let me walk through the 4 most common accumulation patterns I see in enterprise organizations.

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The first is content drift.

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You build a training program.

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It is accurate and relevant at the time you build it, but the business changes.

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A product is updated, a process is revised, a regulation is amended, and organizational structure shifts.

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The training isn't updated because nobody has flagged it as a priority or because the L&D team doesn't have the capacity to update it alongside everything else they are doing.

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The content drifts further and further from current reality, and the workforce continues completing it and being recorded as strain on something that no longer reflects how things actually work.

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Content drift is endemic in compliance training.

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Particularly, I have spoken with compliance leaders who in who have inherited training libraries where a significant.

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Portion of the content is materially outdated, sometimes by years.

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The content exists, the completions are being tracked, the boxes are being ticked, but the knowledge being transferred doesn't reflect current regulatory requirements and the dashboard shows green.

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The second pattern is coverage gaps.

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Your training program was designed for one population, but the business has grown or changed and there are enough people in roles that weren't that weren't anticipated when the program was originally designed.

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Or the program was built for your headquarters team but never properly localised for your regional operations.

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Or it was built for experienced employees and doesn't make sense for new hires who lack the contextual knowledge.

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Coverage gaps are particularly common in organizations that have grown through acquisition.

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You acquire a company, you inherit their workforce, and now you have a large population of employees whose training foundation is completely different from your own, built on different systems, different processes.

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And different cultural and regulatory contexts.

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Building the training bridge between 2 organizations is a substantial production challenge that most post acquisition integration plans significantly underestimate.

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The 3rd pattern is velocity mismatch.

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Your business is changing faster than your training function can produce content.

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This is a pure execution capacity problem we have introduced in episode one, but I want to name it here as an accumulation mechanism because it is ongoing.

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Every week the velocity gap versus the learning debt grows a little larger.

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A new feature ships without sales training.

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A compliance update arrives without an updated module.

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A process changes without a job aid.

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Velocity mismatch is a silent accumulator.

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It doesn't feel dramatic day to day, but over a quarter over a year, it builds a substantial backlog of training that should have been delivered and worsened.

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The 4th pattern is measurement blindness.

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Most organizations measure training completion, far fewer measure whether the training actually produced the behaviour or capability it was designed to produce, which means you can have a training program with 95% completion and near zero impact on actual performance.

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And your dashboard shows a green light when you eventually look under the surface.

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Through a performance gap, an audit finding, a customer complaint, or a preventable incident, you often find a layer of trading debt that the completion metrics never showed.

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The dashboard was lying, but not maliciously, but structurally.

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I want to turn now to what I think is the most practically useful framing in today's episode, what it actually looks like for a functional leader to own this problem rather than delegate it.

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The instinct when you recognise a training debt problem is to take it to L&D and that is appropriate.

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L&D is the function that designs and delivers training, but stopping there is insufficient for a specific structural reason.

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L&D is resourced at a level that reflects the organization's historical expectation of what the training function needs to produce.

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If demand has grown, and in most organizations it has significantly, the resourcing may not have kept pace.

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L&D may already know that they have a capacity problem.

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They may have been escalating it internally, but escalation within the L&D function has limited leverage if the people with budget authority and business consequence exposure, that is you as a functional leader, aren't actively sponsoring the conversation.

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The most effective interventions I have seen in organizations where learning debt was becoming a material business risk have all had one thing in common.

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A functional leader, not the CLO, but a sales VP, a chief compliance officer or a chief people officer decided to own the problem rather than delegate it.

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So what does owning it look like in practice?

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4 things.

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First, understand your own training demand, not just request training when you think you need it, but actively map the training requirements your function will generate over the next 12 months.

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Product launches, regulatory deadlines, organizational changes, system rollouts, headcount growth.

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If you can give L&D a rolling 12 month demand forecast, you change the planning conversation from reactive to proactive.

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Second, understand the production timeline.

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Training doesn't appear on demand.

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A well designed enterprise e learning module takes time.

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It needs analysis, content development, subject matter, expert review localization.

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Quality assurance and deployment.

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If you are requesting training 4 weeks before it needs to go live for 1000 people in 6 languages, you are not giving L&D a fair problem to solve.

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Understanding the realistic production timeline changes how you plan.

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3rd, sponsor the resourcing conversation.

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If your training functions demand has grown and the internal L&D capacity hasn't, someone needs to make the case for closing that gap.

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That case is significantly more powerful coming from a sales VP who can show the revenue impact of training debt than from an L&D leader describing workflow capacity.

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4th and most important, redefine what success looks like.

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Move from measuring training completion to measuring training impact.

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If you are the head of sales, your training metric shouldn't be the percentage of reps who completed the new training module.

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It should be the percentage of reps who can successfully position the product in a customer conversation within 30 days of completion.

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That's a harder number to get, but its the number that connects training investment to business performance.

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Let me share a scenario from a financial services organization.

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A large bank operating across multiple countries with significant regulatory training obligations across their compliance and risk functions.

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The head of compliance at this organization had inherited a situation where the training completion reports looked healthy, consistently above 90% across all mandatory programs.

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But what wasn't visible in those reports was that approximately 35% of the content had not been updated in over 18 months.

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During which time there had been 3 material regulatory updates that should have triggered content revisions.

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The discovery came during a regulatory examination.

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The examiner asked to see not just completion records but the training content itself and flagged that several modules referenced superseded guidance.

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The bank was not fined, but the examiner noted the finding and required a remediation plan.

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That remediation plan cost significantly more than the content updates would have cost if they had been done when the regulatory changes were first published.

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When we looked at why the updates had been delayed, the answer wasn't that nobody knew about the regulatory changes.

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The compliance team knew immediately.

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The answer was that when the updates were flagged to the training function, the L&D team was carrying a backlog of 15 other projects and couldn't prioritise the compliance updates without dropping something else.

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The compliance team escalated within L&D but didn't escalate to the business, to the CFO, to the general counsel, with the framing that this was a regulatory risk, not a training workflow issue.

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After the examination, the head of compliance changed her approach.

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Fundamentally, she became a direct sponsor of the training update program.

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She sat in quarterly capacity reviews with the head of L&D.

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She escalated the production capacity constraint to the CFO as a risk management issue.

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Which resulted in a budget allocation for external content development support that hadn't previously been available.

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Now, 2 years later, the content maintenance program was running on a defined cycle with external production support specifically designated for compliance updates.

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At the next regulatory examination, the examiner noted the improvement as a positive finding.

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The difference between the first examination and the second was in the quality of the L&D team.

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It was the act of sponsorship of a functional leader who understood that this was her problem to own.

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3 things to take away from today's episode.

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First, do a learning debt audit for your function this week.

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List the training programs that directly serve your team's performance or compliance obligations for each one.

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Ask 3 questions.

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When was it last updated?

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Does it reach everyone?

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It should, and do you have any evidence that it changed what people actually do and not just what they click through?

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If you can't answer all 3 confidently for any program, you've found your debt.

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Second, map your training demand for the next 4 quarters.

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Give L&D this picture and you change the conversation from reactive to proactive.

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3rd, find out where your functions most critical training need currently sits in the L&D production queue and what's blocking it.

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Not to override L&Ds priorities, but to understand whether there is a capacity constraint that you have the organizational leverage to help address.

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That's episode 2 of the e Learning Champion podcast.

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The key theme today, learning death is a business risk that shows up in functional leaders numbers, not in the L&D budget.

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And owning the solution requires you to show up differently in the training conversation.

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Now episode 3 is going to talk about the hidden cost of a slow training pipeline, specifically the time based costs that most organizations have never calculated because they are measuring completion rather than velocity.

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It is one of the most eye opening conversations I have had with operational leaders.

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This episode also has 3 standalone 10 minute versions, parts 12, and 3, which cover each section individually.

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If you want to share just the business case section with your CFO or just the accumulation patterns with your L&D team, those standalone parts will be available on the same channel.

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Subscribe wherever you are listening.

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Share this with a colleague who's navigating a training backlog right now.

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I am Sushmitha.

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Thank you for listening to the eLearning Champion podcast.