Andy Candler has spent nearly four decades in L&D without setting foot in an HR team, and he thinks that’s exactly why it’s worked. In this refreshing and honest take, he champions a commercial, customer-focused approach to learning that’s more about storytelling and sales than tick boxes and training plans.
At a recent learning event the conversation turned to L&D, its alignment with HR, and the usual comments about people strategy and employee engagement. It got me thinking about my own experience in L&D, and I said something that brought the chat to a stop:
“I’ve worked in learning and development for 38 years – and I’ve never worked with an HR department.”
That caused a ripple of confusion and disbelief amongst some in the group. For many people, L&D is HR. The idea that you could work in learning for almost four decades without ever collaborating inside that department seemed completely alien. Yet for me, it’s been the most natural thing in the world.
My success has been measured in sales growth and brand loyalty
My path through L&D hasn’t been about compliance, onboarding, or internal policy. It’s been about helping marketing and product teams educate their audiences, whether that’s retail partners, distributors, or salespeople, so they can talk about products with confidence and enthusiasm. My “learners” have often been outside the client company, not inside it. And my success has been measured in sales growth and brand loyalty, not completion rates or competency frameworks.
It’s also been about creative partnership. Working alongside brand and product leaders means you’re not just a supplier; you’re part of the storytelling process. You’re helping to shape how knowledge becomes belief, how people move from ‘I’ve heard of it’ to ‘I get it’ and finally to ‘I can sell it.’
The HR default
In corporate life, it’s easy to assume that learning and development should sit within HR. It’s convenient, it fits an org chart, and it’s where most people first encounter their learning, through performance reviews, compliance courses, or leadership training.
But that default can quietly narrow the field. When L&D reports to HR, its priorities often follow HR’s agenda: internal processes, staff retention, legal obligations, and internal culture. All important, of course, but they’re not the whole story of how people learn, grow, and perform.
What I’ve seen, working outside that structure, is how learning can thrive when it’s closer to the product and the customer. Marketing teams think about emotion, engagement, and storytelling. Product teams think about clarity and usability. When you combine those mindsets with good learning design, you get something that’s both useful and exciting. You stop ‘delivering training’ and start ‘building understanding’.
Where L&D meets marketing
In my experience, most L&D professionals see Marketing as the sexy department that gets all the budget and attention. But I’ve always seen it as the natural home for learning that’s designed to inspire action.
Marketing and learning share the same foundations: understanding people, shaping behaviour, and communicating clearly. When I’ve worked with product teams, such as an innovative travel brand, a global tech company, or a premium audio manufacturer, the conversations have been about how to bring a story to life, not how to tick a skills matrix.
One project, for example, involved building an online learning hub for a consumer electronics brand sold through thousands of 3rd-party retail stores. The aim wasn’t to “train staff”, it was to equip advocates. It needed to help every salesperson understand the product so well that they’d immediately want to recommend it to customers. We created interactive, bite-sized learning modules, videos, and short “day in the life” product stories. The result was that staff engagement went through the roof, and the brand saw a measurable lift in sell-through rates across Europe.
That, to me, is learning at its most powerful: when it changes behaviour in the real world, not just in the LMS. And it’s where the disciplines of learning design and brand communication overlap beautifully – both rely on empathy, clarity, and the ability to spark curiosity.
The commercial reality
Another difference lies in how success is measured. HR-led learning tends to focus on completion and compliance. Marketing-led learning focuses on conversion and confidence. When you build training for a sales channel or a customer-facing team, you can’t hide behind participation stats. The question is simple: did it make a commercial difference?
In one of my projects, we tracked engagement with training modules and how those stores performed in sales afterwards. The correlation was strong and immediate. When store staff understood the products, sales increased, as did customer satisfaction scores.
That kind of data changes the conversation. Suddenly learning isn’t a “nice to have”; it’s a commercial asset. It earns a seat at the business table because it drives measurable results. And that’s a mindset I wish more of our profession would embrace – not to chase numbers for their own sake, but to demonstrate that great learning has tangible value beyond employee engagement surveys.
Different cultures, same goal
Working outside HR doesn’t mean working against HR. It just means seeing L&D as a wider discipline, one that can serve many corners of a business. When I collaborate with marketing teams, the language is different. They talk about audience segments, not learning cohorts. They care about campaign performance, not course completion. But underneath it all, they’re still driven by the same human truths: attention, motivation, and action.
L&D professionals have the tools to make that happen. We understand how people absorb information, what helps them retain it, and what gets in the way of behaviour change. Those are skills that every department could use, especially those that live closest to customers.
And perhaps most importantly, working outside HR has kept me close to the creative energy that first drew me to this profession: the joy of simplifying the complex, helping people feel capable, and watching them succeed because of something they’ve learned.
Looking beyond the usual boundaries
The L&D field often talks about “earning a seat at the table.” I’d argue that we already have one, but maybe we’ve been sitting at the wrong table. Instead of limiting ourselves to HR initiatives, we could be shaping how companies communicate with their customers, how products are launched, how sales teams are enabled, and how partners are supported.
The world of learning is much bigger than the employee experience. It’s about helping people understand and believe, whether they’re inside your organisation or outside it. The moment we lift our eyes beyond the traditional boundaries we start to see just how much untapped potential there really is for learning professionals.
I believe working in L&D for 38 years, without ever working with HR, has given me a clearer view of what learning can really achieve when it’s allowed to stretch beyond the walls of HR. Because if the purpose of learning is to help people do something better, faster, or with more confidence, why would we ever confine that to one department?
Andy Candler is a Plain Speaking Learning Consultant and founder of Aprendido
