L&D teams face growing demands, shrinking resources and mounting pressure to demonstrate business value. Yet many lack visibility of their own workloads and priorities. Drawing on new research, Ryan Austin explores how learning leaders can take control of incoming requests, make better decisions and strengthen their strategic influence.
Last year, I wrote about how talent and L&D teams can earn a seat at the table automatically, by running the function like a business. The response told me something. Most leaders agree with the idea. The hard part is doing it when the day-to-day work keeps getting in the way.
Where does the work come from… and does it connect to anything the business cares about?
This year we went looking for evidence. What is actually happening inside enterprise learning teams, week to week? Where does the work come from, who does it, and does it connect to anything the business cares about?
This two-part feature shares what we found. It draws on a new joint research report from Cognota and Brandon Hall Group, Visibility to Lead. Signals to Execute. Part one covers the visibility problem and what to do about it: how work gets in, how it gets ranked, and how to govern it without adding red tape. Part two covers capacity, proving value, AI and a 90-day plan to get started.
What the research looked at
The report uses three kinds of evidence:
- Conversations with senior leaders
In 2026 we met with CLOs, CHROs, VPs of talent and heads of learning and HR operations, plus three university-hosted roundtables. Their organisations ranged from mid-size companies to firms with more than 200,000 people, across financial services, professional services, manufacturing, life sciences, healthcare, technology, retail and aviation - Platform data
Cognota’s analysis of how work actually moves through dozens of enterprise L&D and talent functions on our platform, tracking how it shifted over 2026 - Brandon Hall Group’s 2026 research
This is focused on L&D maturity and the AI-enabled HR operating model
A fair warning on the evidence: the interviews are directional, not statistical and the platform data is our own, not a neutral benchmark. But when leaders in different industries describe the same problem without being prompted, and the data shows the same pattern, it is worth paying attention.
The pressure, in four numbers
None of the pressure on L&D is new. Doing more with less, fighting for budget and building better managers have been on the list for 20 years. What has changed is how fast it is moving. One learning leader described a multi-million-dollar AI investment with zero added headcount. Her company plans to double in size in five years with a flat headcount. Doing more with less is not a side effect of that plan. It is the plan.
Here is what that looks like in the 2026 data:
- 34.2% of active projects had no assigned priority, up from 22.7%
- 12% fewer people were actively logging work, while total hours logged held flat
- 65% of all task volume was carried by the busiest 10% of the team, up from 49%
- 2x the share of consulting and advisory requests, from 3.6% to 7.7% of intake
Put simply: fewer people are doing the same work, more of it is landing on a few shoulders, a growing share of it has no clear priority, and the business is asking for more advice and less delivery. None of that shows up in a completion report.
“AI is actually making them busier, not less busy”
Global Head of Learning, enterprise software company
1. Build visibility into the function
Finance runs on a general ledger. Sales runs on a CRM. Engineering runs on a ticketing system that shows exactly what is being built and by whom. L&D mostly runs on none of these. Work comes in by email, Teams message or a hallway chat. It gets tracked in whatever mix of spreadsheets, project boards and LMS reports is in use that quarter. When leadership asks what the team is doing, someone spends a week rebuilding the answer.
Almost every leader we spoke to wanted one view of their function: people, work, spend, vendors and impact. Very few had it. Instead, we heard about workarounds:
- A CLO tracking business goals in a shared Excel file
- A senior director builds his own BI dashboard from a data lake, because his LMS can’t show how efficient the team is
- A VP of global talent at a 60,000-person manufacturer who can’t see her total budget across eight centres of excellence
- A former managing director of learning at a 230,000-person bank who had hundreds of people reporting to him and was never given access to his own budget. He was told, “You don’t need to worry about that.”
Leaders were also clear that they don’t want a blank analytics tool to design themselves. As one head of global talent development put it: “I shouldn’t have to build that. I don’t want to have to think about it. Here’s the data you need.”
The fix is not a bigger dashboard. It is one governed record, a single place where every request, project, task and hour is visible in real time to the people accountable for the function. Everything else in this feature depends on having that first.
Actionable steps:
- Count your sources. If your operational data lives in three or more disconnected tools, or reporting upward means pulling numbers by hand, you are pre-visibility. Fix that before you push hard on ROI
- Decide what you need to know before you build anything. As one CLO warned, “Most of the data is what’s possible as opposed to what’s needed.”
- Split decision data from delivery data. Before approval, capture the business issue, sponsor, audience, expected result, evidence of need, priority, effort estimate and decision date. After approval, add owner, milestones, status and evaluation plan
- Where data is uncertain, label it “estimate” or “not yet known” rather than inventing precision
Tip: Know which kind of leader you are reporting to. One CLO told us, “If I didn’t show anything, no one would ask.” For a trusted leader, visibility feels optional. For one new role with a cost target, it is the most urgent need of all. Pitch your case to match.
2. Measure the backlog before you try to shrink it
The first sign of a visibility gap is an invisible backlog. In 2026, the share of active projects with no documented priority rose from 22.7% to 34.2%. That is more than a third of active work with no basis for ranking it against anything else. Over the same period, approval rates slipped from 85.4% to 82.7% while request volume held steady. Triage is not keeping up with demand.
An unranked backlog does real damage. It means the loudest stakeholder wins, not the most important goal. And it means nobody can explain, with evidence, why one project moved and another stalled.
“You may have one stakeholder who’s squawking pretty loudly, but that may not be the main priority of the enterprise.”
Former L&D leader at three global enterprises
Actionable steps:
- Track the share of active work with no assigned priority as a standing metric, next to intake volume and approval rate. Review it monthly, not once a year
- Tie every project to a company goal in two tiers: a department priority, and the company goal above it. Leaders told us the company goal matters most, and mixing the two hides the link
- Record what you reject and defer, and why. It is the clearest proof that prioritisation is real
3. Turn intake into a filter, not a queue
Here is a pattern in the data that surprised me:
- Around four in ten requests across the teams we studied were learning administration, the lowest-value category in the mix. That held steady through 2026
- Meanwhile, consulting and advisory requests nearly doubled
- Assessment and evaluation work grew
- Pure delivery requests shrank
So the function is handling admin tickets with one hand while being asked for more strategic, judgement-heavy work with the other. And most teams have no way to tell the two apart when a request first comes in.
A structured intake process breaks that cycle. Score every request against a small set of questions before it gets scheduled. Anything that can’t answer them goes on a waitlist, not a project plan. It sounds like a small change. In practice it is the highest leverage move available, because it changes the terms of every conversation that follows.
Leaders with mature intake add one more check. A Vice Chancellor of People, and former tech-industry CLO, put it this way: “People have a problem immediately, they think it’s a training problem when it might not be.” Her team sorts each request by type, confirms it really is a training problem, and defines how success will be measured before anything is built.
Actionable steps:
- Ask three questions of every request:
- What business goal does this serve?
- What happens if we don’t do it?
- Who owns the outcome?
- Add a diagnostic step.
- Is this a training problem, or does it need performance support, a process fix, manager reinforcement or an existing resource?
- Define the success measure before you build.
- Track audience, format and timeline, and plan follow-ups at 30, 60 and 90 days
- Agree on scoring weights with business leaders up front, before you rank individual requests. A score is an input, not a verdict. Legal and safety needs can still override it
- Treat approval as a commitment of capacity, not just permission to start
Tip: The best teams don’t have separate L&D goals. At one professional services firm, L&D goals are the company goals (sales, people development, AI) restated for the function. If you can’t tie a project to one of them, that is your cue to have the “no, not now” conversation.
4. Govern the work without adding paperwork
Governance came up early, and without prompting, in nearly every conversation. For these leaders it is not a compliance afterthought. It showed up in three forms.
1) Ungoverned spending
At a global retailer, store operations quietly signed a multi-million-dollar contract for a game-based learning system without L&D knowing. The learning leader had to shut it down. At a global biotech, the head of talent development inherited six learning management systems and five separate leadership programmes. She is down to three systems and aims for one within a year.
2) Shadow programmes
Whole initiatives are running where L&D can’t see them.
“What’s keeping me up at night is not what I’m not being asked. It’s what’s being done without my team being involved.”
Chief Learning Officer, professional services
He found out from a social media post that a procurement group had launched its own leadership programme.
3) AI-generated content
Any manager with a chat window can now produce a training module in minutes, with or without L&D. Governance built for a world where content needed specialist tools and people won’t hold up on its own anymore.
None of this is an argument for more forms. It is an argument for governance built into the tools people already use: standards, decision rights and audit trails that happen automatically. Done well, governance stays invisible to the people doing the work and fully visible to the people accountable for it. Most functions today have that backwards.
Structure varies a lot. We found at least six different reporting lines among participants, from L&D reporting to the COO, to a fully federated model with no CLO at all. Two patterns held. Strategy tends to be central. Governance tends to be shaped around whatever keeps work moving.
Actionable steps:
- Adopt a federated model. Own standards, technology and AI permissions centrally. Let business units own delivery and local content
- Set clear decision rights. At one global manufacturer, directors can shift work within a quarter without approval, but must escalate anything that changes scope or crosses a year’s boundary
- Govern at five decision points: intake (is the problem and owner clear?), prioritise (does the value justify the capacity?), design (are quality and risk checks done?), launch (are measures confirmed?) and review (what changed in the business?)
- Match depth to need. Review tools and vendors at renewal rather than tracking every login
- Plan for exceptions. Decide who can fast-track urgent work and how the capacity impact gets recorded. If most work is labelled urgent, you have a planning problem, not an intake problem
Tip: Start by asking which decisions routinely stall, and who should have the authority to resolve them. That tells you more than any org chart redesign.
Where to start
If this feels like a lot, start with one question: can you see total spend, work and capacity across the whole function in one place? If the answer is no, that is your first job. Everything else, from capacity planning to ROI to AI, sits on top of it.
Brandon Hall Group’s 2026 research found that 39% of organisations are still in the reactive or standardising phases of L&D maturity. For them, the first priority is simply to get a reliable inventory of demand and work. For the 61% further along, the job is to govern the portfolio and tie it to business results. Either way, visibility comes first.
In part two:
- Capacity as a warning light: why workload concentration is an early sign of attrition, and how to shift from 10% strategic work toward 70%
- Closing the ROI credibility gap: the two promises, made in order, that earn executive trust
- Governing AI before it governs you: a staged model for switching AI on safely
- From visibility to signals: a five-stage framework, a Fortune 50 case study and a 90-day plan
Ryan Austin is Founder and CEO of Cognota
The full report, Visibility to Lead. Signals to Execute, was produced with Brandon Hall Group
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