Unlock your talent and L&D team’s full potential with a new approach to learning operations, or LearnOps®.
The outlook is bright for today’s talent and L&D teams. The function is experiencing bigger budgets and greater buy-in from the highest levels of the organization than ever before. With that has come increased interaction with business partners and the opportunity to create interventions that impact the bottom line.
But with a higher strategic profile in the organization comes greater pressure to deliver results. So, talent and L&D leaders are turning their attention to the operational efficiency of their functions to ensure they can deliver high-quality learning experiences at a faster pace.
There’s no doubt that the opportunity to move from cost center to performance driver presents many challenges for talent and L&D teams. Data is needed to improve measurement and tie outcomes back to business performance. The technology stack must support efficiency rather than causing further silos in collaboration and communication. Processes need to flow smoothly and result in seamless workflows and hand-off between team members. Resources must be leveraged to their fullest potential.
So, how can talent and L&D unlock their full potential?
That’s where LearnOps® comes in.
Teams need to produce better learning experiences that support business performance at a faster pace.
But what do talent and L&D teams say is holding them back?
It’s clear talent and L&D teams know there are elements holding them back from producing better training at a faster rate. But the root cause behind the barriers listed above really comes down to how learning operations are structured, implemented, and monitored.
So, what are the operational gaps facing talent and L&D that result in limited resources, scope creep, and more?
What do talent and L&D Professionals Say is the Top Barrier to Faster Production? *
* According to research published by the Association for Talent Development
Silos and inefficiencies in these areas are causing time, budget, and resources to flow through leaky talent and L&D processes and disparate technologies. By taking a new approach to their structure, processes, workflows, data, and technology, teams can address these inefficiencies and create an operational framework that ensures talent and L&D is fully aligned with the business.
Time and cost savings across all talent and L&D processes can increase the team’s ability to work faster and better. Talent and L&D professionals often focus on the development and design of learning, but there are other processes that lack efficiency or, in some cases, are not clearly defined in the learning organization, such as intake, project planning and tracking, resource management, and more.
Clear oversight into your team’s capacity and the availability of resources is critical to answering the demand for talent and L&D prioritizing high-impact interventions. Launching a training program or taking on new projects without proper capacity planning often results in missed deadlines, an overworked team, and less effective solutions for for talent and L&D.
Many talent and L&D teams continue to rely on email, spreadsheets, shared files, and generic tools to manage and run their operations. This leaves team members struggling to collaborate efficiently. Important tasks and documentation slip through the cracks, work is often duplicated, and hours are wasted moving from one tool to another throughout the learning lifecycle.
When you get buy-in from senior management within the organization, it’s imperative that you can prove the results of learning investments. without the data and processes to connect learning initiatives to business outcomes, talent and L&D continue to find it challenging to validate their contribution.
Regardless of how you achieve it, business alignment is critical to a successful talent and L&D plan. Without it, talent and L&D are left to take last-minute requests from the business. Or, other departments take training or program development into their own hands without guidance from the team that knows best when it comes to interventions.
LearnOps® is a philosophy and framework for creating efficient Learning Operations. It enables better alignment with the business, clear oversight into talent and L&D team’s workload and capacity, data-driven planning and decision making, and maximization of talent and L&D resources.
By taking a Learning Operations approach to the way your talent and L&D department is run, you can speed up creation, expand your team’s capacity, and create value throughout the entire lifecycle.
LearnOps® improves outcomes for the talent and L&D department across multiple processes and touchpoints with the business.
By focusing on learning operations, including people, structures, processes, and technology, talent and L&D can ensure they’re positioned to respond to demand, place their resources in the right place at the right time, and ensure learning outcomes are aligned with business success.
Applying a LearnOps® philosophy to your operations requires the right technology to fuel your operational efficiency.
With a platform created specifically for talent and L&D operations, you can:
Standardize processes and keep everything from intake, project management, collaboration, and department insights in one place. Streamline collaboration and day-to-day workflows for your team and stakeholders.
Closely collaborate with stakeholders and clearly align your talent and L&D team with business performance objectives. Leverage operations data to prioritize high-impact learning interventions that will improve business KPIs.
Increase your team’s productivity through clear oversight into their current and future workload. Maximize resources by delivering them to the right place at the right time.
Cognota provides purpose-built software to power learning operations and the transformational support you need to be successful.
LearnOps (Learning Operations) is a philosophy and framework for running talent and L&D as an efficient, data-driven operation. It brings structure, processes, workflows, data, and technology together so learning teams can align with the business, manage capacity, and prove impact. The term was coined by Cognota.
LearnOps is short for “Learning Operations.” It applies operational discipline — similar to how DevOps transformed software or RevOps transformed sales — to the way talent and L&D teams plan, execute, and measure their work.
Talent and L&D teams adopt LearnOps to overcome the operational gaps that slow them down: limited resources, scope creep, lack of standardization, disjointed collaboration, and missing data. According to ATD research, 67% of teams cite limited resources as their top barrier to faster production. LearnOps addresses the root cause by reorganizing how learning operations are structured and monitored.
An LMS (Learning Management System) delivers and tracks training to learners. LearnOps governs the operations behind the scenes — intake, capacity planning, project management, resourcing, and reporting — that determine how efficiently a team produces that training. They’re complementary, not competing.
General project management tools track tasks, but LearnOps is purpose-built for the talent and L&D lifecycle — intake of business requests, capacity planning for L&D-specific workloads, and reporting tied to learning and business outcomes. It’s an operating system for the L&D function, not a generic task tracker.
Implementing LearnOps means standardizing your team’s approach to intake, project planning, resourcing, delivery, and measurement, supported by a platform built for L&D operations. Teams typically start by assessing their current maturity, then centralizing processes, collaboration, and data in one system.
