Employees get interrupted 275 times a day. 80% say they don’t have enough time to do their jobs. Focus breaks every two minutes.
And yet — we keep building content and hoping people find it, open it, and actually do something different because of it.
At ATD 2026, Bianca and I made the case that most L&D teams don’t have a content shortage. They have a content strategy problem. Here’s everything we covered — plus the tools we promised to share.
Most L&D teams don’t have a content shortage. They have a content strategy problem.
Three Moves Before You Create Anything New
Move 1: Audit
What do you already have? Most L&D teams have more content than they realize — and less of it working than they think. You can’t fix what you haven’t counted.
A content audit doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start by asking: Is it easy to find? How often is it actually being used? Is it still relevant to the people it’s supposed to serve? Score what you have before you build anything new.
Places for People did exactly this — and projected £1 million in savings, not by building more content, but by finally knowing what they had and making it accessible to 11,000 employees.
Move 2: Align
Does your existing content connect to a real behavior change and a business goal that actually matters? Content without alignment is just noise with a completion rate.
Three questions worth asking before you greenlight anything:
- Who is this for — really?
- What do they need to do differently?
- Why does the business care?
Move 3: Organize
A content strategy isn’t a spreadsheet. It’s a system your whole team can actually use — with strategic goals, defined audience segments, content types and channels, content models, an editorial calendar, and a plan for what happens when content gets old.
Walmart committed $1 billion to structured workforce development built around a content strategy. You don’t need a billion dollars. You do need a system.
Write for Attention, Not Just Completion
Here’s a number worth sitting with: 80% of people read a title. Only 20% go further.
That means your title is your content for most people. Write it accordingly.
We use the SURE principles to make everything we write worth reading:
- Simple — Readability is a good proxy for learnability. Aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score of 55+.
- Useful — Write for the learner’s problem, not the organization’s process.
- Resonant — Emotions create memory. Facts alone don’t.
- Easy to skim — Headers, chunked text, and visual hierarchy do the heavy lifting.
The title contrast we showed says it all: “Annual Code of Conduct Certification” is written for the org. “When the Rules Don’t Cover It: How to Make the Right Call in Gray Areas” is written for the person who has to sit through it. One earns attention. The other just assumes it.
Make Your Content Go Further
Marketing turns one webinar into 20+ pieces of content. L&D turns one webinar into… one webinar. That gap is fixable.
Three strategies worth stealing:
- Curation isn’t forwarding a link. It’s editorial judgment. Be the person who knows what’s worth someone’s time — and can explain why.
- Crowdsourcing taps expertise that already exists in your organization. Bosch built thousands of how-to videos created by workers, for workers. L&D curated and surfaced. They stopped building most of it themselves.
- Repurposing means creating less and distributing more. Kapost turned a single eBook into 122 pieces of content. The content pyramid works — if you actually use it.
Resources from the Session
Everything we referenced, in one place:
- Sharethrough Headline Analyzer — Test your course titles and content headlines before you publish them.
- Message Makeover Coach — A free GPT tool for rewriting training copy so it actually earns attention.
- 100 Ways to Repurpose Content in L&D — Organized by source type and effort level. Steal freely.
- Content Strategy Template — The audit and planning templates we referenced during the session.
If you want to go deeper on everything we covered, our book Think Like a Marketer, Train Like an L&D Pro lays out the full framework — including the Attention Triggers, SURE principles, and a lot more. [Grab a copy here.]