While a recent HR Executive report claims 96% of organizations cut senior L&D roles this year, the more critical question is not the number itself, but what happens to the work of building employee capability when the official owner is gone. The work, after all, does not disappear. It just gets a lot more expensive when nobody is steering the ship.
Reading a 96% Stat Like a Scientist
#A headline like “96% of Orgs Eliminated Senior L&D Positions” gets attention. The June 2026 report from HR Executive is making the rounds for a reason. But a number that high, over just a few months, should make you curious before it makes you panic. Such figures often come from surveys with self-selecting respondents or depend heavily on how a term like “eliminated” is defined. Is it a layoff? A retirement not backfilled? A re-titling of the role?
Instead of taking the number as gospel, treat it as a signal. It points toward a real trend: organizations are questioning the traditional, centralized L&D function. The danger isn’t in questioning it. The danger is in assuming that by deleting a box on the org chart, you’ve eliminated the need for the work itself.
The Unfunded Mandate on Your Managers
#When a senior L&D role vanishes, the responsibility for keeping teams skilled and competent doesn’t vanish with it. It scatters. It lands, often silently, on the shoulders of frontline managers who are already stretched thin. They are handed the keys to the company’s learning platform and are implicitly told, “figure it out.”
This is not a strategy. It’s an abdication. It turns the crucial work of employee development into an unfunded mandate. Managers, who were promoted for being good at their job, not for being experts in pedagogy, are now expected to be instructional designers, coaches, and skills-gap analysts in their spare time. The predictable result is that the most important work (coaching, practice, feedback) is replaced by the most visible, least effective work: assigning videos and checking for completion certificates.
Naming the Real Risk: Capability Debt
#There’s a term for the gap that grows when an organization stops investing in its people’s skills: capability debt. It is the accumulating difference between what your team needs to be able to do and what they can actually do. Like financial debt, it accrues silently at first. You don’t notice it day to day. You notice it when a key project fails, a safety incident occurs, or you realize your team can’t use the expensive new tools you just bought.
Eliminating the L&D function without a plan for who owns the practice of building capability is the fastest way to accelerate this debt. It’s a strategic blunder disguised as a cost-saving measure.
What Gets Lost: The Science of Sticking
#A dedicated L&D function, at its best, is the custodian of how people actually learn. It knows that watching a video once doesn’t lead to durable skill. My early work studying how information gets encoded in the brain showed one thing clearly: knowledge that isn’t actively used, decays. The science has been consistent on this for decades. Landmark research by Roediger & Karpicke (Psychological Science, 2006) demonstrated that actively trying to retrieve information from memory makes that information much more durable than simply re-reading it.
This is called retrieval practice. It’s the engine of all real learning. When a busy manager is put in charge of training, this is the first thing to go. There’s no time for structured practice or spaced repetition. The result is training theater, not actual capability.
The Defensible Position for an L&D Leader
#If you’re an L&D leader watching this trend, the answer isn’t to defend your title. It’s to make the function of managing capability debt indispensable. Stop talking about “training hours” and start talking about “days to competence.” Instrument your programs to show how they reduce errors, improve performance on the job, and close the specific skill gaps that are putting the business at risk.
Frame your role not as a purveyor of courses, but as the strategic partner who ensures the company’s most valuable asset, its people, can actually do the work the business needs them to do. That’s a function no sane organization eliminates. They just might call it something else.
Sources
#- 96% of Orgs Eliminated Senior L&D Positions This Year, New Data Reveals. HR Executive. June 2026.
- Roediger, H. L., & Karpicke, J. D. (2006). Test-Enhanced Learning: Taking Memory Tests Improves Long-Term Retention. Psychological Science.