A new manager starts on Monday.

She gets a quick orientation, a folder of resources and links to a few online courses. But her team is short-staffed, there are three urgent deadlines, and her calendar is already full.

“I’ll get to the training when things settle down,” she tells herself.

Six months later, things haven’t settled down.

Instead, she has learned the job by watching others, asking questions when she can and figuring things out as she goes. Some of what she has learned is excellent. Some is outdated. Some is simply wrong. And some things she has never had the chance to learn at all.

Sound familiar?

This is what I’ve been thinking about as learning debt.

Why learning debt matters

We’re used to talking about technical debt: the problems that accumulate when we choose a quick solution today, knowing we’ll need to fix it later.

Learning debt works in much the same way.

Organizations make reasonable short-term decisions. We’ll postpone the training. We’ll skip the debrief. We’ll get everyone together when things slow down. We’ll document that process later.

Each decision seems small. But the debt accumulates.

People develop workarounds. Knowledge gets concentrated in a few people. New employees learn outdated practices from experienced colleagues. Managers don’t have time to coach. Teams repeat mistakes because no one has time to stop and ask what they learned.

Eventually, “we don’t have time to learn” becomes part of the culture.

And that has a performance cost.

What if learning isn’t the thing we add?

For years, workplace learning has often meant taking people away from their work to learn: a workshop, webinar, course or conference.

Those things still have value. But they can’t carry the whole load.

Most workplace learning happens while people are actually working: solving an unfamiliar problem, getting feedback, watching a colleague, trying something, making a mistake and trying again.

The emerging opportunity for L&D is to become much more intentional about that.

Instead of asking only, “How do we make time for learning?”, we can also ask:

“How do we design work so that learning happens within it?”

How do we start paying down the debt?

It doesn’t necessarily require another course.

It might mean building ten minutes of reflection into the end of a project.

It could be a manager asking, “What did you try? What happened? What will you do differently next time?”

It might mean peer problem-solving, job shadowing, communities of practice or giving someone a stretch assignment with the support to succeed.

And it means creating enough psychological safety for people to say, “I don’t know,” ask for help and talk about what didn’t work.

Perhaps the biggest shift is this:

Learning is not separate from performance. Learning is how performance improves.

When organizations are too busy to learn, they may be borrowing time from the future.

And eventually, that debt comes due.

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