Key Takeaways
- The traditional model of funneling all training through L&D creates a bottleneck that slows down the business
- Self-service creation—where SMEs use accessible tools and templates—dramatically increases speed and volume
- L&D shifts from production to quality assurance and strategy
- Standards can be embedded in tools; quality doesn't require L&D to build everything
There's a peculiar inefficiency at the heart of how most organizations create training.
The people who know the content—product managers, subject matter experts, experienced practitioners—don't create the training. They explain what they know to instructional designers, who interpret it and build something, which then gets reviewed and revised in a back-and-forth that can take weeks or months.
The instructional designers do valuable work. They bring structure, learning principles, and production skills. But the process creates a bottleneck. Everything flows through a small team. Every new training need joins a queue.
What if the experts could create training themselves?
The Argument for Self-Service
This idea makes L&D professionals nervous, and understandably so. They've seen what happens when untrained people create training. Walls of text. Death by PowerPoint. Content that's comprehensive but incomprehensible.
The concern is legitimate. Instructional design is a real discipline. But here's the thing: quality is already suffering, just in a different way. The L&D bottleneck means training often arrives late or not at all. Teams wait months for content that's outdated by the time it launches.
A perfect course delivered six months late is worth less than a good-enough course available now.
Differentiating Needs
The argument for self-service training creation isn't that instructional designers are unnecessary. It's that their involvement shouldn't be required for everything.
Some needs are complex and high-stakes. Leadership development. Major skill-building programs. Compliance training with legal implications. These deserve—and require—professional instructional design.
Some are simple and urgent. A new feature was released, and the sales team needs to understand it by Monday. A process change, and the team doing the work needs to know about it. A question keeps coming up, and it would be faster to create a quick training than to keep answering it.
For this second category, the traditional model breaks down. The need is immediate. The content is straightforward.
Self-service doesn't mean every person for themselves. It means giving people the tools, templates, and guardrails to create simpler training themselves—while reserving L&D's expertise for work that genuinely needs it.
What Makes Self-Service Viable Now?
The tools have changed. Authoring used to require specialized software and technical skills. Modern tools are more accessible—drag-and-drop interfaces, templates that enforce good structure, and intuitive workflows that guide people through creation.
AI has changed things further. With AI-powered training content creation, an expert can upload a document, answer some questions, and have AI generate a first draft of training content—quiz questions included. They're editing and refining rather than creating from scratch.
And the expectations have shifted. The elaborate, highly-produced training of the past isn't always what learners want or need. Sometimes, a five-minute video from the person who actually knows the thing is more valuable than a polished module that took months to produce. Authenticity and timeliness can matter more than production value.
For This to Work Well, L&D's Role Has to Evolve
Instead of creating all training, L&D creates the infrastructure that enables others to create training well. The templates. The standards. The guardrails that prevent the worst mistakes without blocking legitimate creation.
Instead of being the bottleneck, L&D becomes the quality layer. They can review what's created, offer coaching, and ensure critical training meets the bar. They're curators and enablers, not the sole producers.
This requires L&D teams to let go of some control. It requires trusting that others can create good-enough training with the right support. But the alternative—maintaining control while the queue grows—isn't actually protecting quality. It's just controlling what gets created while failing to meet the organization's actual training needs.
The Concerns About Quality Are Addressable
Standards can be embedded in tools. Templates that require learning objectives before content creation. Structures that enforce good organization. Assessment generators that create questions aligned to objectives. The tool itself can guide people toward better practices.
Review processes can exist without creating bottlenecks. An expert creates something, and it gets a light review before going live. Not a month-long development cycle, but a sanity check. High-stakes content gets more scrutiny; simple content gets less.
Feedback loops can drive improvement. When learners can rate and comment on training, quality issues surface quickly. Poor training gets flagged. Good training gets recognized. The system self-corrects over time.
What Organizations Find When They Embrace Self-Service
Training gets created that wouldn't have existed otherwise. The quick explanations, the just-in-time guides, the answers to questions that didn't justify a formal training project but kept coming up anyway. Organizations can create training in minutes instead of months. The total volume of helpful content increases.
Subject matter experts become invested in training. When they can see their knowledge directly helping colleagues, they care more.
L&D has more time for strategic work. When they're not buried in routine content creation, they can focus on the complex programs that actually need their expertise. Leadership development. Organizational capability building. The work that moves the needle. They can even build custom virtual experts that extend SME knowledge across the organization.
The case for self-service is ultimately practical. Organizations need more training than their L&D teams can create. The people who have the knowledge often can't wait for a development cycle. And the tools now exist to help non-specialists create useful training. For a comprehensive look at how AI is transforming L&D, including the shift from production to enablement, see our complete guide for L&D leaders.
JoySuite makes self-service training creation possible. Turn documents into learning content. Generate assessments with AI. Create training that's good enough and available now. Reserve your L&D team for work that actually needs them.
