How to Hire for Learning Operations (Not Just Instructional Design)

For most of L&D's history as a function, the default hire was an instructional designer. You needed more content? You hired more IDs. The team wasn't keeping up with demand? More IDs. You wanted to modernize your eLearning? You guessed it. More IDs.

And then organizations started scaling. The LMS needed someone who could actually run it. Projects started slipping through cracks because nobody owned the intake process. Leadership wanted data on learning impact, but there was no one with the analytical chops to pull it together. The brilliant generalist ID who could do everything was being crushed under things they were never designed to own.

I built a 26-person global L&D team across three continents, managed a $500K+ annual budget, and made 72 final hiring decisions out of 200+ interviews. The thing I learned most painfully, and most expensively, is that hiring a team of instructional designers and expecting operations to run itself is a trap. This article is about how we got out of that trap, and what we'd build differently from the start.

---

TL;DR

• Most L&D teams are over-indexed on instructional design and under-indexed on operations roles: LMS admins, project managers, data analysts, content ops specialists
• The "brilliant generalist ID" myth is real and expensive: design talent and operational talent rarely coexist at the level you need both
• Skills-based hiring opens the pool significantly and is more predictive of success than degree-based filters, but fewer than 1 in 700 hires are actually affected by skills-based policies in practice

---

🛠️ The Five Roles We Should Have Hired First

Here's a question worth sitting with: if you stripped away all the content production from your team for six months, what would break first? The answer is usually the infrastructure. The LMS. The project intake system. The data reporting. The vendor relationships. Not the courses themselves.

Yet most L&D hiring plans list "Senior Instructional Designer" at the top and treat everything else as secondary. After going through what we went through, I'd reorder that list significantly.

Learning Operations Manager. This person owns the L&D system as a system: intake, prioritization, workflow, vendor management, reporting. They sit between L&D strategy and L&D execution. Without them, every other role on the team is operating without an air traffic controller. The absence of this role doesn't show up immediately. It shows up as chronic project delays, conflicting priorities, and a director who's constantly pulled into coordination work instead of strategy work. That was me for longer than I'd like to admit.

LMS Administrator. Salary benchmarks put this role between $71K and $96K depending on experience and platform. That's not a small number. But the alternative, spreading LMS administration across your instructional designers, costs far more in lost productivity, inconsistent configurations, and platform underutilization. I've watched teams spend six figures on an LMS implementation and then fail to fully use it because nobody owned it. I've run three LMS migrations: Litmos to Moodle, and two Moodle instances to Skilljar. Each one required someone with deep platform knowledge. Trying to handle that kind of technical work through a distributed ownership model is a recipe for a painful implementation.

L&D Data Analyst. This one is often missing entirely. When leadership asks "is our training working?" and the L&D team's answer is completion rates and satisfaction scores, we have a credibility problem. An analyst who can connect learning data to performance data, track leading indicators of behavior change, and present findings to executives in business terms is worth more to the function's survival than most teams realize until they don't have one.

Content Operations Specialist. Think of this person as the production manager for L&D content. They own templates, QA processes, file management, version control, accessibility compliance, and localization coordination. On a small team, this work gets absorbed by IDs who are resentful about it and bad at prioritizing it. On a scaled team, it becomes a serious quality control problem. We built 637 modules in a year. Without someone owning content operations systematically, quality consistency would have been much harder to maintain.

L&D Project Manager. The fact that most instructional design programs don't teach project management is a genuine skills gap in the field. A dedicated PM who understands learning project dynamics (SME availability, review cycles, production dependencies) is a multiplier for every other person on the team. We got this right later than we should have. The difference in project predictability after we had a dedicated PM was significant.

---

📚 The Myth of the Brilliant Generalist

There's a persistent belief in L&D hiring that the right senior instructional designer can do it all: design, development, project management, data, LMS administration, SME relationships, and stakeholder communication. Sometimes that person exists. They're also the first person your competitors are trying to hire away from you, and you can't build a sustainable team on the assumption that you'll always have unicorns.

The T-shaped professional model is more useful here. Everyone on the L&D team should have deep expertise in something (their vertical) and sufficient cross-functional competency to collaborate effectively (their horizontal). But trying to hire T-shaped people who are deeply expert in instructional design AND deeply expert in LMS administration AND deeply expert in data analysis is asking for something that rarely exists. You're better off hiring clearly for the depth you need and building deliberate overlap into your team's workflow.

What I saw when I hired too broadly without defining depth requirements: people stretched into roles they weren't equipped for, quality inconsistencies, and the quiet resentment that comes from being asked to own work you didn't sign up for. The ID who is brilliant at scenario-based design shouldn't be responsible for your LMS user management. The LMS admin who knows your platform inside out probably shouldn't be your primary instructional design resource. These are different expertise sets, and conflating them doesn't help either person do their best work.

The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs 2025 report estimates that 44% of core workplace skills will change by 2028. That reality makes T-shaped professionals valuable, but it doesn't change the underlying principle: know what depth you need, hire for it clearly, and build the scaffolding for people to grow their horizontal reach over time rather than expecting it on day one.

---

🔎 What Skills-Based Hiring Actually Means in Practice

85% of employers claim they've adopted skills-based hiring. Harvard research shows that fewer than 1 in 700 hires are actually affected by those policies in practice. The gap between intention and execution is enormous.

In L&D specifically, the skills-based conversation often gets stuck at degree requirements. "Do we need a master's in instructional design?" is the question that gets debated, when the more useful question is: "Can this person demonstrate the specific competencies this role requires?"

What skills-based hiring actually requires is upfront work that most hiring managers skip: defining the competencies for each role before writing the job description, then building interview processes that actually test those competencies rather than just asking about them. Research suggests skills-based approaches produce candidates 19 times more likely to succeed and candidates from a pool that's significantly larger when degree filters are removed. Costs per hire have been documented as $7,800 to $22,500 lower. 94% of employers who've actually implemented it report it as more predictive of performance.

But here's the honest version: skills-based hiring requires more upfront rigor than traditional hiring. You need to know what success looks like in the role before you can test for the skills that predict it. We got better at this over time. Early in building the team, I was writing job descriptions around skills I could name rather than skills the role actually required. That's a common mistake, and it leads to hiring people who look good on paper in ways that don't map to the specific operational demands of your team.

For operations roles specifically, I started using work samples as part of the interview process. Ask an LMS admin candidate to walk through how they'd set up a specific user management workflow. Ask a project manager candidate how they'd handle a common scenario in content development (SME delays, shifting scope, competing deadlines). The conversation that emerges tells you more than any resume line or behavioral question about generic leadership.

---

🌳 Non-Traditional Candidates Are Often the Best Operations Hires

Some of the strongest operations hires I've seen in L&D come from backgrounds that traditional job descriptions would filter out: K-12 teachers transitioning out of classrooms, sales enablement coordinators moving into L&D, marketing project managers who want to build learning programs, subject matter experts who've been informally creating training for years and want to formalize it.

What these candidates often bring: mature work habits, comfort with ambiguity, practical experience designing for real audiences (K-12 teachers especially), and a kind of adaptability that comes from working in under-resourced environments where you can't wait for perfect conditions to do good work. They also bring fresh eyes on processes that career L&D practitioners sometimes take for granted.

The gap is usually technical: authoring tools, LMS administration, eLearning production workflows. That technical layer is trainable for someone with the right foundational competencies. The judgment, the communication skills, the ability to coordinate across competing priorities, those are harder to develop. If you have to choose what to hire for and what to train for, hire for the harder stuff.

This connects to the "culture add" research, which shows 5.4x higher retention when hiring for culture add (what someone uniquely contributes) rather than culture fit (whether they resemble people already there). Non-traditional candidates almost by definition bring culture add. The question is whether your hiring process is structured to see it.

---

📋 Building the Team as a System

The DevOps philosophy offers a useful lens for L&D team design: break down silos between roles, align around shared goals, and build joint retrospectives into the workflow so learning about what's working becomes a team practice rather than a post-mortem after things fail.

Applied to L&D, this means thinking about how your roles connect rather than just what each role does. Your LMS admin and your content ops specialist need shared processes for publishing and versioning. Your data analyst and your instructional designers need shared understanding of what metrics matter before a course is built, not after. Your project manager and your operations manager need clear handoffs so projects don't fall into the space between their roles.

I'd also argue that the team's onboarding process is a useful mirror for how well-designed the team structure is. If a new hire can't understand within 90 days how their role connects to everyone else's, the design has a problem. We went through a period where new team members were unclear on decision rights, unclear on who owned what, and spending real energy figuring out the informal org chart. That's not a people problem. It's a design problem, and it starts with how you structure roles before anyone is hired into them.

---

💰 The Budget Case for Operations Roles

Here's the pitch for leadership when you're trying to justify a $75K LMS administrator or a $70K learning ops manager: what is the team's current output costing you in operational inefficiency?

If your IDs are spending 20% of their time on LMS administration tasks, and you have 10 IDs, you're paying 2 full-time ID salaries for work that a dedicated LMS admin could do better and cheaper. If your projects are consistently delivering late because nobody owns project management, and late projects mean delayed sales enablement or compliance exposure, the cost of that project management gap is real and likely exceeds a PM salary.

Operations roles are often rejected in L&D budget conversations because they don't directly produce content. They're infrastructure. But infrastructure is what determines whether your content production scales or collapses under its own weight. We scaled from 50 to 637 modules in a year. That didn't happen because we hired more IDs. It happened because we built the infrastructure to support production at volume.

The business case isn't "trust me, operations matters." The business case is: here's what our current operational gaps are costing us in time, quality, and ID bandwidth. Here's what a dedicated operations role would recover. That conversation, grounded in numbers, lands differently than a general argument for better team design.

---

🎯 The One Thing to Do This Week

Draw your current team structure and label every role. Then, next to each role, write down what percentage of that person's time is spent on work that isn't their core expertise. If the numbers are uncomfortable, you've found your next hiring conversation.

---

If you've built an L&D operations function from scratch, or if you're trying to make the case for operations roles and hitting resistance, I'd like to hear what arguments have landed and what hasn't. What's the version of this conversation that actually works in your organization?

-- Eian