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For many L&D leaders, the problem does not start with strategy. It starts with bandwidth.
The business wants faster onboarding. Compliance training needs constant updates. Managers are asking for AI upskilling yesterday. Meanwhile, the L&D team is buried in storyboards, review cycles, vendor follow-ups, and production deadlines.
The result? Teams that are supposed to shape workforce capability spend most of their time managing content creation. Across the UAE and KSA, more L&D leaders are starting to ask a difficult question: Should the L&D function still own learning production at all?
There was a time when keeping production internal made sense. eLearning tools were specialised. Vendors were expensive and slow. Most organisations needed in-house teams simply to get learning built.
That world has changed.
Today, businesses need learning that moves at the speed of operational change. AI adoption, digital transformation programmes, nationalisation initiatives, and evolving regulations have dramatically increased the demand for learning across the GCC.
According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, organisations across industries are rapidly prioritising reskilling and capability transformation as technology adoption accelerates. But many L&D operating models still look like they were designed for a much slower era.
Internal teams are expected to handle:
And usually with limited headcount. The issue is not capability. It is structure.
When L&D owns end-to-end production, three things tend to happen.
Senior L&D professionals end up acting as production managers instead of strategic partners to the business. Instead of focusing on workforce capability, performance improvement, or future skills planning, their time disappears into reviews, revisions, and delivery coordination.
Every new learning request creates a resourcing problem. If the team lacks animation skills, they outsource. If they need video production, they brief an agency. If priorities suddenly change, timelines slip again.
Learning production becomes reactive and fragmented. And in fast-moving organisations, delayed learning quickly loses value.
This is the part many teams miss. When stakeholders mainly experience L&D through content delivery, the function gets associated with production rather than performance impact.
The conversation becomes: “Can you build this module?”
Instead of: “How do we solve this business problem?”
That distinction matters more than most teams realise.
The strongest L&D functions are shifting their attention away from production ownership and back toward areas where they create the most value.
That usually includes:
Production still matters. It just does not need to sit inside the core team structure.
This shift is one reason managed learning services and Learning as a Service (LaaS) models are gaining traction across the region. Instead of building a large permanent production team or coordinating multiple vendors, organisations access specialist capability on demand through a single partner.
That includes areas such as:
The advantage is flexibility.
Teams can scale production up during major onboarding, compliance, or transformation periods, then scale down when demand stabilises, without carrying the fixed overhead of a large internal team. More importantly, internal L&D leaders regain time for strategic work.
One concern comes up almost every time this model is discussed: “If we outsource production, how do we maintain quality and consistency?”
The answer is governance.
High-performing L&D teams do not give away ownership of learning strategy. They simply stop managing every production task themselves.
That means keeping control of:
Production becomes a managed capability rather than a permanent operational burden.
Many organisations still frame the conversation as: “Should we build internally or outsource externally?”
But the more useful question is: “What should our L&D team uniquely own?”
In most cases, the answer is not animation, editing, or development work.
It is strategy, performance, capability building, and business alignment.
The organisations that recognise this shift early are creating L&D functions that move faster, operate leaner, and contribute more strategically to the business.
And in a region transforming as quickly as the GCC, that shift is becoming harder to ignore.
The most strategic L&D teams are not the ones producing the most content. They are the ones spending the most time solving business problems. Contact us here for your Learning content creation needs.
