ThoughtLab: Stop Fighting to Be Heard: How to Position L&D as Business-Critical
💡 ThoughtLab: Join our interactive webinars where speakers share research, projects, theoretical models, or lessons learned on L&D-relevant topics. Dive into new insights with the community.
✨ Participation: This session is ideal for L&D professionals who want to move from order-taking and reacting, to leading decision-making with strategies.
Most L&D professionals are working harder than ever, and still struggling to prove they belong in the room where decisions get made. Not because they're not good at their jobs. Because they're solving the wrong problem first.
In this session, Candice Mitchell, L&D strategist, USA Today bestselling author, and founder of Talent Collective, shares the framework she's used across industries and continents to help L&D professionals stop reacting and start leading. You'll learn how to zoom out before you build anything, how to speak the language of the business before it speaks over you, and why training must always be the last thing you design, not the first.
This is not a session about learning theory. It's a strategic operating system for L&D professionals who are done being the last people called and the first people cut.
🎁 KEY TAKE-AWAYS
The 3 foundations you need in place before any learning solution exists: Know the business. Know the people. Build the bridge. Miss any one of these and your best work lands in a vacuum.
The 5-step strategic alignment model: A practical tool for connecting global trends, people trends, industry context, and company priorities to a learning solution that actually sticks.
The questions L&D should never ask: and the ones that earn a seat in strategy conversations from day one. (Spoiler: "What do we need to train people on?" is already too late.)
How to position any learning initiative as a business outcome, not a training deliverable, so leaders fund it, sponsor it, and remember it.
About our Host:
Candice Mitchell, MSc | CEO & Founder, Talent Collective
Candice Mitchell has spent nearly 20 years working every layer of the L&D profession, from entry-level administrator to national strategy lead to building and scaling her own consultancy. She holds an MSc in Organizational Leadership with Strategic Innovation and Change from the University of Denver, and is the USA Today bestselling author of Choose You: For the People Who Refuse to Disappear.
She founded Talent Collective to develop L&D, HR, Change, and People leaders into strategic business partners, because she believes People teams are the most underleveraged growth lever in any organization. Her work focuses on business-wide capability strategies, and moving capability upstream rather than a reactive afterthought. Her work has reached practitioners across industries and continents.
Candice is South African, based in the US, and brings a global lens to a profession she chose deliberately, and has never stopped advocating for.
Role on visual: CEO & Founder, Talent Collective
The Impact Toolkit: https://talentcollective.org/impact
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/candicemitchelltc/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/candice_mitchell_msc/
Website: https://talentcollective.org/
See you there, Angela and Barbara