What’s the difference between learning and enablement?
To put it simply:
- Learning is an internal change process that you go through.
- Enablement is a systematic approach to creating conditions for high performance.
So, naturally, “learning” makes most executives puke.
It scares away investors, it feels too messy and ambiguous, and most terrifying of all – it sounds expensive.
Enablement on the other hand is at the same time broader yet more specific; broader in that it gives practitioners the scope to go beyond designing training to examine root causes of behaviour and potential solutions, and more specific in the sense that it is more clearly a business process aligning individual and company interests.
Putting it in context
In recent history, many companies have shifted their focus away from workplace learning to employee enablement. It’s kind of an extension of the Learning vs Performance argument that’s been going on for decades. In a nutshell, this semantic argument has mostly focused on the fact that learning is a process and performance is the desired outcome, so learning designers should call themselves performance consultants to better align with business interests.
The enablement trend has taken this in a more concrete direction by naming the activities that lead to performance in most sales and operations roles, it fits well with task based behaviours that can be systematized. “Enablement” is more comparable to the use of the word “training” in that it describes what the practitioners are doing, rather than the receiver. Again, learning is an internal individual change, rather than something the company does.
This trend is likely to continue and here’s why:
In North American culture, we really struggle with our fear of failure in general. Learning is often equated with failure these days, and rightfully so – it’s through overcoming challenges that we really learn anything in a meaningful and memorable way. And so, it seems inevitable that the term learning will be banished from the workplace and relegated to something you need to do on your own time.
On the other hand, learning and development, the imperfect messy human cousins of enablement, are actually invaluable to the success of managers and leaders and thus, the company. “Learning and Development” addresses the talent to leadership pipeline the company needs to build to compete and sustain itself long-term.
Conclusion
Of course companies would rather hire someone who already has the necessary leadership skills rather than take on the high costs of training them, but that’s not realistic. Leadership ability is not something that is ever “done”, but rather an ongoing practice of personal development and companies benefit from investing in it.
Many large enterprises have differentiated these roles in meaningful ways because they have enough resources and granular understanding of their people and performance challenges to do so, but leaders at small companies are often looking at these terms and wondering what they mean and when to use them.
The takeaway is that the majority of operations and sales roles benefit from an enablement function to support them, remove friction, and build their capacity with ongoing interventions. At the same time, it’s imperative that you invest in leadership development and fostering leaders from promising operations personnel. One focuses on immediate and short-term needs, and one focuses on long-term organizational sustainability.
So, rather than asking “should I call my department Learning & Development, or Training & Enablement?”, consider how you practice both to shape your organization and deliver business value.
Hot Neon Learning helps you improve performance with communication, learning, and enablement solutions that people love to engage with. By combining sophisticated storytelling, emotionally intelligent design, and thoughtful user experience, we transform digital content into behaviour change.
