It feels like these is a disconnect between talent and learning. Not so much that they aren’t in the same place and playing the same game, but more the lack of explicit connection, and implicit overlap between the two.

I was speaking with someone recently about the shopkeeper to engineer analogy – learning needs to be an engineer, supporting redesign and functional change, not just selling courses to the organisation’s buyers. This shift is even more necessary to build the relationship between talent and learning than anywhere else. Simply creating brilliant consumables which are a single element of a person’s development isn’t enough; learning should be creating, designing, and supporting strategic and tactical levers which create organisational impact.

The talent function appears to have that brief right now as part of the OD stream. It will, however, only succeed if the learning function creeps into that domain and asks questions of design, performance, and impact.