What Is L&D For? Identity, Impact and Agency with Andrew Jacobs

Andrew Jacobs joins the pod to explore what L&D is really for and why the profession's identity has to shift from producing courses to engineering performance.

Drawing on a career that spans retail banking, the fire service, retail and local and central government, Andrew explains why capability depends as much on the organisation's capacity to apply learning as on the ability L&D builds and why AI has made that conversation urgent.

From there, he unpacks his shopkeeper to engineer idea and his view that L&D is like Mexican food, the same ingredients folded differently, before making the case for why people now build their own burrito and L&D's role is to help them do it better.

He then turns to impact, setting out the difference between counting, measuring and evaluating, why a performance baseline matters, and how asking "help me understand" can change the conversation with the business, with a memorable example involving sickness absence and extendable lanyards. Along the way, he discusses podcasting as a way of connecting people and surfacing the insight inside an organisation, the 50 Big Ideas to Change L&D, and the health of the profession today.

He closes with why he won't give advice without understanding someone's context, and, in a bonus segment, why L&D should respond to uncertainty by agreeing principles rather than writing a strategy. It's a thoughtful conversation for anyone in L&D who wants to move from taking orders to solving problems.

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KEY TAKEAWAYS

From Shopkeeper to Engineer: L&D often acts as a shopkeeper, taking orders for courses and delivering them without questioning the root cause. To drive real change, L&D professionals must become performance engineers who step back, understand the business problem, and build systemic solutions.

L&D is like Mexican Food: Much of what the learning profession produces uses the exact same ingredients, just folded and packaged differently—like a burrito versus a fajita. Rebranding basic management training as leadership development without changing the core approach fails to solve actual business needs.

The Capacity Gap: L&D is highly skilled at addressing ability through courses and workshops, but it consistently fails to address organizational capacity. True capability requires building the relationships, structures, systems, and technologies that allow employees to apply what they learn.

Measure Outcomes, Not Inputs: The profession needs to stop measuring input data like attendance, course completions, and test scores. True evaluation requires establishing a baseline of current performance, defining the target outcome with stakeholders, and measuring the actual shift in business results.

BEST MOMENTS

"We can do ability until we're blue in the face. Courses, classes, workshops, brilliant, design and materials and content. What we fail to work within is the capacity part of capability within the organization."

"L&D's like Mexican food. We do this all the time... it's the same ingredients but folded differently and cooked in the oven."

"We are arguing about the seat at the table so much that we're forgetting that maybe the table won't exist anymore."

"The first step you take as a crew manager is backwards. And that's what L&D needs to do. When someone says, we've got a fire, I need some help, can you do a course for me? What we should do is go, step back, absolutely, what's the problem? And start talking in terms of performance within the business."

Andrew Jacobs Bio

Andrew Jacobs is the Learning Principal for Llarn Learning, known for innovative thinking about learning, training and technology. He has significant e