Job titles will often tell you what the organisation thinks the work is. I came across a role titled Learning and Development Consultant. That signals something specific: Diagnosis, advisory work, shaping demand, and owning outcomes beyond activity.

The job description told a different story. Build content, run the LMS, translate briefs into modules, fix user issues, and report on usage.

All necessary and valuable work but not consulting.

This pattern is common, and organisations use “Consultant” as a label for credibility. What they actually need is someone to keep the system running and produce learning at pace.

The gap matters.

It creates expectation mismatch. Candidates step in expecting to influence decisions, and they spend most of their time building content and managing a platform. It constrains the function if the role is framed as consulting but structured as delivery; no one is doing the actual consulting and the system stays reactive.

It confuses stakeholders. A consultant who cannot challenge or redirect demand is not seen as a consultant for long.

There is a cleaner way to think about it. Separate the work into four categories.

Consulting: define problems, shape demand, and decide where intervention is needed. Brokering: translate between business need and learning response, manage stakeholder relationships, and navigate organisational politics. Design and production: build the assets. Systems: run the platforms and the data.

Most L&D roles collapse all four into one job. Then inflate the title to compensate.

That inflation is not just imprecise job design. It is a symptom of positional insecurity because the function lacks a legitimate claim to the advisory work it wants to do. “Consultant” signals the status it has not yet earned structurally and is seen as ‘needy’.

The result is predictable. Busy teams, high activity, and limited impact.

There is one more thing the tidy prescription misses. Scope, authority, and proximity to decisions are preconditions, but they are not guarantees. Consulting authority is earned through demonstrated diagnostic capability. Roles with the right structure still fail if the people in them default to delivery habits or if the organisation has no prior experience of L&D operating at that level.

If the role is mainly building and running, call it that. If you want consulting, design for it.

Otherwise you do not have a consultant. You have a delivery role with a better title.