Someone Took a Chance on You
Why L&D Must Do the Same for Others
I wouldn't be writing this article if a bunch of people hadn't taken a chance on me.
When I stumbled into learning and development, I had enthusiasm and not much else that qualified me for the role. What I did have was a succession of people who were willing to let me try things I wasn't necessarily prepared for, who shared their knowledge generously, and who seemed to understand that building capability meant accepting the occasional spectacular failure alongside the wins.
These weren't formal mentoring programmes or structured development schemes. They were simply experienced professionals who recognised that if they wanted a future for the industry, they needed to invest in people who might one day carry it forward. The time they spent explaining why certain approaches worked, the patience they showed when I asked obvious questions, the opportunities they created for me to stretch beyond my comfort zone, all of this shaped not just my career but my understanding of what L&D could be.
Yet as I look around the industry today, I'm increasingly concerned that we're failing to do the same for the next generation. Worse, we might be accidentally eliminating the very opportunities that allowed people like me to find our way in.
The Invisible Industry
Most people have no idea what we do. Ask a recent graduate what an instructional designer is, and you'll likely get a blank stare. Mention learning and development, and they might think you work in early childhood education. Our industry operates in a peculiar shadow, essential to organisational performance yet mysteriously absent from career guidance conversations.
This invisibility isn't entirely our fault. We don't have the natural touchpoints that other professions enjoy. Engineering students see bridges and buildings. Marketing students encounter advertisements daily. But learning design, performance consulting, and workplace capability development remain hidden within organisations, visible only to those already inside.
The result is that we largely rely on people "falling into" L&D rather than actively choosing it. Someone moves from teaching, or transitions from subject matter expertise, or discovers training responsibilities added to their existing role. It's a recruitment model based on happy accidents rather than strategic talent acquisition.
Where We Focus Our Development Efforts
Meanwhile, scroll through any L&D conference programme or professional development offering, and you'll find the landscape dominated by one question: how do we move from individual contributor to leader? The industry obsesses over leadership development, transition programmes, and senior capability building. These aren't wrong priorities, but they represent only half the talent equation.
We've become pretty good at developing people who are already in the industry, whilst paying minimal attention to how we bring new talent in. It's rather like having an excellent university but no primary schools. Eventually, you run out of qualified applicants.
The few formal entry routes that do exist, graduate schemes and apprenticeships, remain scattered and often unknown to the very people who might benefit from them. Even when organisations do create these opportunities, they rarely promote them beyond their immediate networks, missing the chance to attract diverse talent from unexpected backgrounds.
AI Acceleration
Here's where the story takes a concerning turn. As artificial intelligence capabilities expand, the pressure to automate routine tasks intensifies. On the surface, this seems positive. Why shouldn't we use technology to handle content creation, basic analysis, or administrative work more efficiently?
The problem lies in what happens to the people who traditionally performed these tasks as they learned the industry. Junior roles often involve exactly the kind of work that AI can increasingly handle: updating course materials, conducting simple evaluation surveys, organising learning resources, supporting workshop logistics. These aren't glamorous responsibilities, but they're how newcomers develop industry knowledge whilst contributing value.
When senior leaders, who tend to make automation decisions, look for cost savings and efficiency gains, entry-level positions become obvious targets. After all, senior people are seen as the necessary counterbalance to AI, the ones with judgement and experience to guide technology effectively. Junior staff, unfortunately, are often viewed as more easily replaceable.
This creates a vicious cycle. We eliminate the roles that serve as entry points, then wonder why we struggle to find qualified candidates for more senior positions. We're optimising for short-term efficiency whilst accidentally destroying our talent pipeline.
The Compound Effect
The mathematics of this situation should worry us. If we reduce entry-level opportunities whilst the current workforce progresses through their careers, we create a growing gap between the number of senior roles and the number of people with sufficient experience to fill them. In ten years, when today's senior leaders retire or move on, who replaces them?
Other industries learned this lesson the hard way. Manufacturing's focus on automation without attention to skills development created massive capability gaps. Journalism's disruption eliminated many entry-level positions, leading to a shortage of experienced reporters. We have the opportunity to avoid repeating these mistakes, but only if we recognise the pattern before it's too late.
The irony is that L&D, of all industries, should understand the importance of deliberate talent development. We spend our careers designing learning journeys for other professions whilst neglecting our own succession planning. We know that expertise takes time to develop, that tacit knowledge transfers through experience and observation, that complex professional capabilities require guided practice over extended periods.
A Different Kind of Outreach
What would it look like if we took entry-level talent development as seriously as we take senior leadership development? For starters, we might actually tell people outside our industry that we exist. Career fairs, university partnerships, school visits, professional showcases, all the basic outreach activities that other professions take for granted.
We might create structured pathways that allow people to explore L&D without fully committing, internships or project-based opportunities that give both sides a chance to evaluate fit. We might develop clearer descriptions of what various L&D roles actually involve, moving beyond vague titles to concrete explanations of daily work and career progression.
Most importantly, we might design our automation strategies with talent development in mind. Instead of simply eliminating junior tasks, we could use AI to augment junior roles, allowing newcomers to focus on higher-value work whilst still developing foundational knowledge. This requires more thoughtful implementation than wholesale replacement, but it creates better outcomes for both efficiency and capability building.
Note: I am aware that some of these things are happening in some places, but it’s not the norm.
The Personal Investment
This isn't just about formal programmes or organisational strategies. It's about individual choices that each of us makes when we encounter someone new to the industry. Do we take time to explain our reasoning, share our experience, create opportunities for them to contribute meaningfully? Or do we assume that efficiency demands doing everything ourselves?
The people who invested in me didn't do it because they had surplus time or formal mentoring requirements. They did it because they understood that their knowledge had value only if it could be transferred, that the industry's future depended on developing its next generation, that building capability was part of their professional responsibility.
That investment has paid dividends far beyond what they could have predicted. Not just in my individual development, but in the knowledge I've been able to share with others, the problems I've been able to solve, and the small contributions I've made to the field. This is how professional communities sustain themselves, through generous investment in uncertain returns.
The Choice Ahead
We face a straightforward choice. We can continue optimising for short-term efficiency, automating away entry-level opportunities whilst hoping that somehow, qualified senior professionals will materialise when we need them. Or we can make deliberate investments in bringing new talent into our industry, accepting the time and effort required to develop the next generation.
The evidence from other industries suggests that the first approach leads to capability crises that take years to resolve. The second requires patience and resources but creates sustainable talent pipelines that benefit everyone.
I suspect most L&D professionals, when they think about it honestly, know which approach serves our long-term interests. The question is whether we're willing to act on that knowledge, even when it's less convenient than purely efficiency-focused alternatives.
After all, someone invested in us. Shouldn't we do the same for the people who might one day be writing articles about the state of our industry?