It’s the last working week for me in 2024 and I’m taking the opportunity to look back on the most read, commented, liked, and shared posts on the last 12 months. We’re at number three and count down to number one on Friday.

I’ve been writing daily blog posts for six years now and they vary in length; most are a few hundred words, sometimes longer, occasionally shorter; my shortest post ever was one word. In October I published a 31 word post which suggested training and learning were different. It seems I pushed a button; some 10,000 reads, reactions and comments later, this post still gets a view every couple of weeks or so.

Why?

Is what we do in L&D that ill-defined that we argue over what it means?

A decade ago I remember suggesting that learning was just a rebranding of training – effectively the same people wearing a different coat. That’s not true now but there are still people who can’t differentiate between them. To me learning is an umbrella term for lots of things which the L&D function does; training is simply one of them.