How To Build a Modern Learning and Development Team in 2026

Many corporate L&D teams are slow to evolve their philosophies.

The world’s getting psyched about AI, but 90% of L&D functions still use e-learning as their revolutionary delivery method.

We’re in the middle of a transformation that could make or break what we know as the L&D function.

This means we have to rewire not only what we do, but how we do it.

That’ll lead to a new look for our local L&D teams. One shaped around providing the best service to your workforce (aka your customers).

The following is my take on how to build your own modern L&D team to thrive in 2026. Take this as a starting point rather than “this is the way”. As an industry analyst I get to work behind the scenes with lots of different organisations, plus it’s my job to keep up to date with industry changes at large and I was a Head of L&D myself in a former life.

The playbook (if we can call it that) is built from all of these data points with the aim of helping you develop a team to compete at the leading edge of what we do.

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1/ Define the Goals of a high-performing learning team

We start with our ‘why’.

Why are we doing all this and what for? Deep stuff, I know, but we need this clarity before we can continue.

Let’s keep this simple, my take is:

• Enable performance and build organisational capability
• Provide return on investment to the business
• Support the organisational strategy with the right skills at the right time

The ultimate goal of any workplace learning function is to enable and support people in performing at work.

We serve our audience by improving their performance.

They feel good. We feel good, and the company feels good. Plus, better performance should = more business revenue and access to improved career opportunities.

But…for the business…

Corporate L&D is about making an impact on the bottom line. There is no getting away from that. No matter how much it sucks to say.

And that can be achieved by focusing on performance.

Which for me, is built through enablement not just learning.

Moving from production → enablement

In 2026, L&D is in the middle of an identity shift, whether we want to acknowledge it or not.

For the last couple of decades, a big chunk of what we did was mostly production.

Things like:

• Building content
• Creating e-learning 🤮
• Designing resources + courses

A lot of teams are basically internal content studios.

The plot twist of 2026 is that AI can now do most of that faster and cheaper than a team of humans (note: I didn’t say better). That’s what’s happening in the orgs I work with right now.

(There’s a lot of caveats and context to that statement, fyi.)

Which is uncomfortable, because if production was your identity, that identity is eroding at speed.

But, with erosion, comes emergence.

Traditional L&D models will look a lot different over the next 5-ish years.

It’ll be different because every company has decided that AI will be the infrastructure of everything it does.

With that, I am really clear that in order for L&D to be successful, I believe that we need to move from production to enablement.

Let’s call that “revelation number 1” from my analyst notepad these past 12 months.

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2/ Explore the tasks and skills your L&D team needs

Before we explore roles, you need to get clear on the tasks your team does and the skills needed to do these.

To get clear on the tasks and skills you need, try out this exercise.

Tasks vs Skills assessment

Create a table like the one below.

Spend time with your team to analyse the tasks they do today and cross-reference this with the skills the team needs to do these.

Tasks	Skills
What tasks will your team deliver?	What skills will they require to do this?

Use this data to shape how and what your team delivers.

If you have no clue where to start, fret not. I have a wealth of industry data to help you get clarity on the skills side below.

The modern L&D professionals must-have skills (the industry opinion)

Here’s what we see from fellow industry analysts in 2025/26.

The blight of AI companies stealing data to train AI models has meant that many of the quality free sources I’ve shared in previous editions are now behind paywalls.

While this section is more limited on external data than I would like, I do have an opportunity for you to change that in my new research report.

Take part in my one question only survey so we can uncover what skills L&D functions need to deliver impact as chosen by you, the people doing the job.

Results will be shared in the newsletter by early August at zero-cost.

Don’t forget to share with colleagues, friends and enemies.

Note: This is research pulled from publicly available sources. Many of the companies I include provide paid for research that I’ve not included because that would be both unfair and unethical to the company and you.

1/ McKinsey

Released in March 2026, McKinsey’s piece on “Reimagining L&D for the AI Age” gives us the classic consultancy view on our world.

It presents six shifts that uncover 4 skills for us to chew on:

1. Performance Consulting/Strategic partner

McKinsey says L&D must become “a strategic integrator and partner in workforce planning,” sitting in joint forums with business and tech leaders to decide which capabilities matter. You know I’ve been banging on about this for years, nearly close to a decade, and it’s still vital to both our survival and success.

2. AI Fluency

No surprises here, right? You can’t support the business with AI, if you’re not fluent with AI capabilities, tools and decision making yourself. McKinsey says that L&D leaders need to understand how to “redesign roles and decision rights” and coach managers running human-AI teams.

3. Data Analytics

McKinsey is blunt that “most organisations still measure L&D through activity metrics such as hours trained” and that L&D needs to design a new way of measuring success. While I totally agree with this, we certainly don’t have one scalable model that we can all work with just yet.

4. Design Thinking with AI

McKinsey highlights something we all kinda know but don’t like to talk about. L&D needs new design skills to build systems (not courses) that flex by role, skill gap, and context.

2/ The Josh Bersin Company

In addition, HR research analyst, Josh Bersin, offers this perspective on the evolution of L&D teams role up to the modern day.

Bersin is on the same track as moi as we both agree that L&D must move beyond a “publishing model” (build courses, track completions) into what he calls “Dynamic Enablement”, which he feels requires L&D pros to operate more like internal consultants.

Some of the skill themes he surfaces include:

1/ Performance Consulting (again)

Bersin implores L&D pros to act as a “strategic advisor diagnosing business problems and prescribing the right interventions,” rather than waiting for a training request and building a course for it.

2/ AI Fluency (again)

Shock, horror, Fluency again! Much like me, Bersin says this is not the generic AI literacy we see touted around by companies. Instead, its hands-on skills with the tools L&D itself now uses to do its job.

3/ The Learning and Performance Institute

Then we have this collection of 30 skills that the Learning and Performance Institute positions as a common language for L&D teams.

I’m not going to break these down because there are too many, and common sense tells me this is overkill but you can decide that for yourself.

You can take the LPI’s free assessment if you’re an individual (teams + functions need to pay) which comes with a profile and competency report based on the framework.

Skills that modern L&D pros need (my view)

I couldn’t round-up this section without including my analysis, which is more minimalistic in its tone.

Every year, I review and distil the latest industry data to identify the 7 essential skills for modern L&D pros. I use data points from industry bodies and research houses (like the above), plus I map this to data that the 5,000+ readers of my weekly newsletter share with me through annual surveys.

These, coupled with my direct work with organisation’s gives me a constant view of ‘what is actually needed’ for L&D teams to survive and thrive.

Being totally transparent, I’ve not updated this since 2024 but the good news is the 2026 edition is in the works for a release in August/September.

You can shape these insights directly by taking part in my one question only survey to discover what you, as a practitioner, believe are the skills that modern pros and teams need.

One really important note

Despite what you read in this section, context is king.

Your org, its culture and business goals will vary. So you need the skills that support this environment.

No matter where you land, I hope we can all agree that the modern L&D team should focus on performance instead of pushing education.

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3/ How to identify the most critical roles for your L&D team

Now this, my friend, is much harder to align on in 2026.

I wrote the first edition of this guide in 2018. We both see how all forms of artificial intelligence are reshaping how we work.

Although tasks and skills can be identified, who (or what) actually delivers on the tasks is not so clear-cut anymore. We’re using LLMs and AI assistants to support us with many tasks in a collaborative approach, while AI agents are quickly taking over the discussion as “do it for me” solutions.

Now, identifying who does what is going to come down to:

• What can only a human do well to the level required
• What can a human and AI do well together
• Where is AI more efficient than a human

This is not set in stone as a framework.

It’s how I’m currently assessing roles that could exist in an L&D team in 2026, and I do expect that they will not all be done by a human.

What could L&D look like in 2027?

2027 is an arbitrary number, yet I don’t like to look too far into the future.

To help frame how we can think about a modern L&D team, let’s look at the makeup of workplace teams at large with the help of Microsoft.

I think we’ll see a mix of these human + AI teams in the coming years.

Probably not a linear progression, especially how tech moves so fast.

Taking all this into account, roles within the L&D team could be fulfilled by a human, a human with AI or just AI. The answer all depends on the tech, tasks and the context of what you do.

And yes, you might lead a team of AI and humans, too.

Bonus: Get a 3 minute overview of that Microsoft research

The anatomy of a modern L&D function

Let’s unpack what modern learning and development could be.

While this section would historically be classified as “roles”, I think of them more as categories where several roles can exist. Maybe we should treat them as mini-departments.

Note that as we’re reshaping what an L&D function looks like in a world of AI, this will not include many traditional roles that are currently accepted as the standard.

You know I’m all in on enablement and have always been an avid consumer of the sweet drug that is performance based solutions. AI has seemingly only amplified this requirement.

I get that this is very anti-traditional.

While today the function focuses too much on creation, I don’t think that will be the case as we look beyond 2027. Our industry is always slow to adapt, yet in those years from now, I believe we’ll have figured out how to operate creation and curation with AI, mostly.

That’s not to say human oversight won’t be needed, because it will.

But I don’t see as many design or creator roles on the scene when 1-2 people, powered with the right tools, can do the work of a much larger team.

We’re production-focused today, yet I see that balance swinging to the more meaningful side of enablement in the long term.

We’re seeing this come to life in quite a few organisations in real time. People functions are transforming into AI enablement functions already. I’ve seen CPO’s at Atlassian, Zapier, ServiceNow, Moderna and IBM turn into leaders of AI enablement, and for the most part, that makes a lotta sense. As at its core, all of this transformation is more people focused vs tech.

So, the TL;DR (too long; didn’t read) is to aim for enablement and performance and maybe…leave “learning” behind.

3 powerful modern L&D roles to invest in

Let’s pretend you put a gun to my head and demand an answer to “what are the most impactful roles for L&D in 2026?”

These would be my answers

1/ The Learning Strategist

A slight bias to this title as it’s the one I’ve given myself in my business.

When you run the show, you can do crazy stuff like this. Anyway, the strategist function is what it says on the tin, it helps define and refine the strategy for the L&D department.

It’s too easy for L&D teams to wander around doing anything and everything, while pretending it’s ‘all part of the plan’, only to have nothing to show for it all come year’s end.

That’s why you need this role.

It may not be one person, but it needs to exist.

Your strategist will:

• Define the team’s performance and capability strategy (with some sort of CLO)
• Determine what needs to be done, why and define the return on investment
• Direct your team throughout the year to focus on the right things, not more things, to achieve the shared strategy.

This is the core of the role, and you can make it as big or as small as you’d like.

2/ The Learning Experience Architect

These aren’t instructional designers, and they won’t focus on building stuff in authoring tools.

Learning Experience Architects (LXA’s) focus on building the right experiences to solve real problems. Forget about creating paint by number delivery experiences.

These people will be front-facing into the business, so they’ll be focused on performance consulting to design and deliver both digital and physical experiences across the organisation (with and without AI).

Your Learning Experience Architect will:

• Build strong relationships, trust and bring credibility to the L&D team’s work
• Map out the real problems with stakeholders to design and deploy the best solution (and maybe that’s not an L&D one)
• Develop the philosophy and design architecture for performance
• Lead human experiences across physical and digital spaces

L&D is still a business of people.

No matter how much AI integrates across our workflow, people still buy from people, and your LXA’s will be a key part in influencing behaviour change.

3/ Technology Enablement Architect

Naming conventions aside, you can’t have an L&D function without a dedicated focus on technology.

To do that well, you need people who have no clue about learning design, methodologies and all that noise, yet they can work with those who do to craft the best tech stack.

This role spearheads the technology stack that supports both your team and performance across the business.

Your Tech Enablement Architect will:

• Research, test and identify the most useful technology for company performance initiatives
• Craft the user experience and interface of all L&D technology across your organisation
• Support for the design and deployment of in-house and external tools
• Advise the L&D team on tools and infrastructure to support all team performance projects

Of course, the most popular part of the enablement role today is AI Enablement.

It’s where a lot of my work has taken me and you can learn more about what I do, the skills needed and how to craft these yourself with my in-depth breakdown.

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5 shared skills every L&D team needs to have

I know the world likes to put people in boxes, but I’m not a fan of that.

Your L&D team will be full of specialists and generalists, yet they do need a shared language of skills across the function. Now these aren’t necessarily “L&D skills” as I’m assuming you have the role specific skills in place.

The following represents a shared layer across the team.

🤖 AI Fluency

It’s 2026, and AI is now firmly part of our work infrastructure.

Everyone is using AI, and they should be.

Squabbling over if we did or didn’t use it, is utterly pointless. The more important question is: How are you choosing to use AI?

This is where being AI-fluent comes into play.

AI in itself is not a skill but knowing how to use it is. We have to know how not only to use tools, but understand why, when, where and how to direct our own critical thinking across that process.

AI Fluency focuses on equipping people with the confidence and capability to think and work alongside AI.

Its components include:

• Foundational understanding of how AI works (all types, not just generative)
• The ability to determine when AI could be a useful part of a solution, and with this, when it should be used and where.
• The capability to collaborate with AI tools to deliver an outcome (the how).
• Understanding the opportunities and limitations of AI systems from a technical and ethical perspective

Being AI-native is a combo of AI Fluency + Human skills + Instincts (more on the last two later).

Resources:

1. The best AI fluency courses for L&D teams
2. AI in L&D resources, frameworks and system playbooks
3. AI tool and system tutorials

📣 Storytelling (inc marketing and sales)

I’m cheating here a bit because I’m grouping a few categories under one banner.

We’re in the business of people, which means we must be able to connect with them and influence them through change.

That means you have to be a good storyteller.

People don’t change for no reason, and I’m a big believer that good stories entertain people, but great stories change people.

Marketing and sales are both forms of storytelling as they serve the purpose of telling the stories of your work, people and the results.

What I’m not saying is you need to learn to be an expert marketer and salesman, but you’d be wise to understand a few techniques.

Our industry falls too often into the trap of build and they will come. Sadly, they don’t.

You can have the most amazing learning content in human existence, but if no one knows it exists, what it does and why it’s important for them ,  you’re pretty much digging your own grave.

You need the whole team to buy into this way of thinking.

It’s something we each do every day, in many ways.

You market/sell your skills to a potential employer, you market ideas to business leaders, and you even use marketing techniques to convince your crush to go on a date with you.

Resources:

1. What L&D gets wrong about marketing, and how to do the stuff that works
2. The ultimate mini guide to positioning your L&D products for success
3. How to master the art of storytelling for business
4. The rare skills L&D pros need to thrive and survive in the modern workplace

🤝 Performance consulting

Think of Performance Consulting as being the workplace detective of the L&D world.

It’s not just about throwing a training program at a problem and hoping it sticks (or not spraying and praying as I was once told).

You dig deeper, look at the data, and figure out what’s really happening. Then, you come up with a game plan that might be training, but could also be other stuff like better tools, process changes, or even a simple conversation.

The end game is making sure everyone performs better and the business scores a win.

The art of consulting seems lost in L&D teams.

We take a lot of questions but ask few questions. Sometimes, you have to do this. The nature of your organisation can be tough to change.

Your mission is to partner with the workforce to understand their needs and propose the best solution. That might not even be an L&D solution 😨.

Resources:

1. Unpack why performance consulting is so important for the modern L&D pro
2. Craft your consulting skills with The Art of Performance Consulting Masterclass for L&D Teams

🖥️ Digital Intelligence

This skill isn’t exclusive to our industry. It’s a must for every human.

I’ve spent too much of my career watching people shy away from tech. You cannot do that anymore. I hate to sound like one of those morons on social media who say, “Do this or be left behind”. But I’m going to make an exception here.

If you don’t invest in your digital intelligence, you will be left behind.

Defining Digital Intelligence

Let’s keep this simple.

It’s about being savvy, aware and adaptable with new digital technologies. You don’t need to be an expert, but you must be aware of what’s available. Be curious, always.

Our world needs more digital-savvy pros.

As the world of learning continues to be eaten up by tech. You would be wise to become fluent in the language of technology to become a valued strategic business partner.

Even outside of L&D, a basic level of understanding of how different technologies work, connect and support one another is essential.

Not every member of your team needs to be an expert in this field, but they should have a shared understanding.

Again, some of you reading this might be resistant and suggest that a technology team should do this.

Your team will know the application for any learning tech better than anyone. They will understand how it works in practice, so keeping up to date with modern technology will always be an enhancer

This knowledge will separate your team from the industry.

If you keep up with trends, absorb what is useful, avoid what is not and apply what works for your audience. You will create a high-performing learning function.

🥷 Human Instincts

What has real value in the age of AI?

Big question and no one simple answer.

With ‘AI bros’ and false prophets everywhere, we need to have smart instincts.

Here’s my two cents: Taste, context, curation, expertise and a unique point of view are what’s most valuable in a sea of AI-slop.

I’ve bundled these under the label “Instincts”.

I think these, along with strong human skills and understanding how to wield AI meaningfully, is what will set you apart in the years to come.

So, my “simple answer” is to cultivate these alongside your use of AI.

Let’s unpack those instincts in a bit more detail:

• Taste: Knowing what is “good,” not what just “looks good”.
• Context: Knowing why this solution works for this specific situation.
• Curation: The ability to sift through the AI-generated noise and pick the “signals” that matter.
• Expertise: Having the prior real-life experience that backs up the credibility of the above, because if you haven’t actually done ‘the thing’, why would people listen to you?
• Unique Point of View: Some would call this “your voice”, I, on the other hand, just call it “something worth saying”. Anyone can repost an idea, but only the critical thinkers find a new way of looking at them. A UPV only comes from people with experience.

While these instincts will help you to stay sharp in the AI era, you still need to keep yourself accountable so you’re making the right decisions. I talk more about that in this piece.

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The L&D leader

You may know it as the Head of Learning, Director of Learning, Chief Learning Officer or whatever flavour of the month title is today.

Maybe this is you right now, or it’s one of your aspirations.

Nonetheless, let’s unpack what it means to be an L&D leader in the modern era.

What does a L&D leader do?

The learning leadership role for me is one of a strategist, coach and enabler.

What I learnt quite quickly when heading up a department myself is that 80% of my tasks move to nurturing people.

I still got involved in projects from a strategic standpoint, but doing the actual project build wasn’t part of the gig. This was difficult to get my head around at first.

You’re now in charge of the compass and the map, plus your crew of L&D pros.

That doesn’t mean you stop learning.

Like your team, you will be on top of evolving trends, insights and practices which allow you to nurture a clear vision for the team to work towards.

You enable your people to do what they need to.

A modern learning leader should provide the freedom to experiment, propose new ideas, test stuff and ultimately innovate the way you work.

Of course, context, culture and organisational constraints play a big part in what you can achieve. So don’t be too hard on yourself about this.

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Final thoughts

Ok, folks.

This is how I would build a team today. Don’t take what I’ve shared as set in stone.

I’m sure a year from now my recommendation will look different. Instead, use these insights as the foundational building blocks to the function you want to shape, and remember, context is everything. Map this onto your context, not what the industry tells you.

Want to chat about this? Reach me here and on LinkedIn.

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Before you go… 👋

If you like my writing and think “Hey, I’d like to hear more of what this guy has to say” then you’re in luck.

You can join me every Tuesday morning for more tools, templates and insights for the modern L&D pro in my weekly newsletter.