Should Learning & Development Oversee Your Company’s Education Strategy?

Not many organizations have their customer education strategy developed on day one. Rather, education initiatives tend to begin informally and organically. This may take the form of webinars hosted by the marketing team, or product tutorials created by the customer success team. It’s typically not until the business reaches a certain maturity level, demonstrated by product market fit, product stability, and market size, that leaders begin thinking about a formal customer or product education program. But which department is best suited to own this program? 

The Wandering Education Team

Customer education, a common term for the function that trains and certifies customers, has yet to find its standard place in the industry. Some businesses structure customer education within customer success, while others place it as a marketing team. Still others have customer education managers report into professional services, especially when the team offers education as a paid service. Of course, it’s not uncommon for businesses to end up with multiple training teams across multiple departments, with some focusing on partner enablement and others on customer onboarding. 

While not as common, some businesses put customer and product training programs under learning and development (L&D). It sounds reasonable, as there are usually education-focused roles and instructional design processes already in place in L&D. But there are considerable differences between the strategic focus of the two functions and several important factors to consider when making such a decision. The first of which lies in the distinction between the concepts of “learning” and “education.”

Learning Strategy vs Education Strategy

When we hear these two words, learning and education, we may not think about the difference in meaning. But when it comes to business strategy, the distinction is important. Learning, by definition, is “the acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught” (Oxford Dictionary). Education, on the other hand, is “the process of teaching” or the knowledge received by teaching (Cambridge Dictionary). This may sound like trivial subtleties, especially when some dictionaries use similar definitions for both terms, but the contextual differences are important. Learning is an internal process, whereas education is the external focus of what’s being learned.

Learning as a function of talent development

A company’s learning strategy quite simply focuses on how the business as a whole (executive leadership and employees) acquires learning. This is very commonly owned by the human resources department, typically under a talent development team. Larger companies may employ a Chief Learning Officer, whose core responsibility includes development and execution of a company-wide strategy for learning (acquisition of skills), measurement of such learning, and performance (application of learned skills).

The head of a company’s learning and development function must ensure that learning is driving the company’s goals, specifically from the perspective of talent. They will establish that staff have access to learning, whether via third party or in-house training programs, and that what they learn contributes to the success of the organization. As an example, imagine that innovation by way of using AI-related tools is part of the company’s strategy for the next year. The head of L&D would own the development and delivery of necessary training to ensure employees are ready to embrace new technologies.

Education as a strategic lever

Education strategy is quite a bit different than learning strategy, at least in this context. An organization’s education strategy should define how, when, and where they will educate their market on their industry, practices, and solutions. Similar to a marketing strategy, a holistic education strategy spans all audiences and all products and drives any number of high-level success metrics. In this way, the function of education serves as a strategic lever of the business. What do we mean by that?

A strategic lever is a business initiative that drives the business’ strategy forward. If, for example, an organization sees an opportunity to penetrate an entirely new market, education may be a prime lever to pull to increase awareness and drive credibility among that market. As another example, customer churn may be a significant issue for a business. To address it, they may develop a strategic plan to improve customer retention - another great use for education.

When education is positioned properly in an organization, it has the opportunity to drive many goals, including those around employee engagement and performance. This is where you may see overlap between education and learning in a typical company, since employees are part of an organization’s ecosystem. At the end of the day, though, the overlap between HR and EDU is no different than Customer Success and EDU, Marketing and EDU, or Product and EDU.

Efficient Use of Learning Technologies, Talent, and Tools

Why do some organizations place outward facing educational programs within the learning and development department? It often comes down to shared technologies, talent, and tools. It may make sense to put all roles that focus on developing and delivering training under one leader. This approach works best in organizations that employ a functional, or role-based, org structure. However, in some cases, this structure could limit the effectiveness of education across the organization.

It’s important to realize that technology, talent, and tools can work well together even across departments. If an L&D team has access to e-learning authoring tools and learning management systems (LMS), it may be worthwhile to explore how education teams could leverage the same. Many LMS have multi-tenancy capabilities, which makes it possible to host employee-only content in a separate location from public-facing material.

Additionally, you may consider creating working groups for anyone in instructional design (ID) or ID-adjacent roles, allowing them to share ideas, strategies, processes, and tools. Employees don’t need to report to the same leader in order to collaborate in this way. 

Final Thoughts

Determining where your education function should sit within your organization is less about aligning it with existing structures and more about ensuring it has the strategic focus and resources to thrive. While placing education under L&D may seem logical due to shared tools and processes, the fundamental differences between learning and education strategies make this approach situational at best. Customer education plays a unique role in driving external engagement, fostering customer success, and supporting business goals like market expansion or churn reduction. Regardless of its placement, organizations should prioritize collaboration, efficient use of shared resources, and a clear, strategic mandate for their education programs. By doing so, they can unlock the full potential of education as a powerful lever for growth and impact.