I have met many excellent facilitators across Africa. Give them a room and they come alive. They know how to engage participants, ask good questions, manage difficult personalities, rescue an activity that is going nowhere and somehow keep thirty adults awake after lunch when both the air-conditioning and the jollof have formed an alliance against them.

Some are genuinely gifted.

But when I begin asking a different set of questions, the picture sometimes changes. How did you establish that these participants needed the intervention in the first place? Why did you choose these learning methods? How will you know whether people can apply what they learned? What exactly are you going to measure afterwards?

Over the years, particularly through assessing facilitators and Master Trainers, I have met many professionals who are very strong in facilitation but much weaker in needs assessment, instructional design and evaluation. They know how to deliver learning effectively, but they do not always know how to establish whether learning was needed, how to design it properly or how to determine whether it made any difference afterwards.

Those are rather important gaps.

Somewhere along the way, we seem to have allowed facilitation to become shorthand for Learning and Development competence.

It is not.

“A microphone can reveal that you are a good facilitator. It cannot tell me whether you are a good L&D professional.”
Margaret Jackson

Good facilitation is a serious professional craft. A skilled facilitator can read the room, manage participation, listen deeply, ask good questions, navigate difficult dynamics, and turn an activity into meaningful reflection. But facilitation is also highly visible, which may be part of the problem. We can see it happening, and because we can see it, we sometimes mistake it for the whole profession.

Much of the most important work in L&D happens before anybody enters the room and after everybody has left it.

Someone must establish what problem the organization is actually trying to solve. Someone must decide whether learning is even the right intervention. Someone must design the experience, determine what people need to practice, decide what should be left out, think about application, and later establish whether anything changed.

That is why I place needs assessment very high on the list of capabilities every serious L&D practitioner should understand.

A manager says, “My team needs communication training.” Perhaps they do. But perhaps expectations are unclear, trust is low, information is being withheld, or people are afraid to challenge the manager. If we do not diagnose the problem properly, we can design and facilitate an excellent communication program that solves absolutely nothing.

There is a huge difference between responding to “We need a course” with “How many participants?” and responding with “Tell me what is happening that makes you believe a course is needed.”

The first starts preparing the logistics.

The second starts examining the problem.

“Needs assessment is not the paperwork before the real work. It is the professional judgement that tells us what the real work should be.”
Margaret Jackson

Then there is instructional design.

A facilitator may deliver an excellent programme without having designed it. Somebody else may have established the learning outcomes, sequenced the experience, designed practice, built in feedback and decided how learning would transfer back into the workplace.

Those are different capabilities.

Yet we sometimes take someone who facilitates brilliantly and say, “Excellent. Now design the program.” We assume that because both activities occur near a training room, competence in one naturally leads to competence in the other.

It does not.

ATD’s Talent Development Capability Model reinforces just how broad the profession is. It identifies 23 capabilities across personal, professional and organizational domains, including facilitation, instructional design, coaching, evaluating impact, performance improvement, knowledge management, technology application, consulting, business insight and data analytics.

Twenty-three capabilities.

That is rather more than twenty-three ways to run a workshop.

The capability gap that concerns me most, however, is evaluation.

I struggle with the idea that we can spend an organization’s money, take employees away from productive work, run a learning intervention and then have little idea whether anything changed afterward.

We know how many people attended. We know whether they enjoyed the program. We know whether the facilitator scored 4.8 out of 5. We may even know whether the lunch was appreciated.

Then the trail goes cold.

Did people retain the learning? Did they apply it? Did behavior change? Did that change contribute to better performance?

ATD’s 2024 benchmark data is interesting here. Among more than 34,000 respondents from over 150 countries, self-rated proficiency in training delivery and facilitation was 63.1%, while instructional design stood at 45.3%, impact evaluation at 39.8%, and data and analytics at 33.4%.

These are self-assessments rather than independent tests of competence, so we should be careful not to overinterpret them. But the pattern raises an uncomfortable question: are we more comfortable delivering learning than demonstrating what the learning actually did?

“If you cannot tell me what changed, you have told me what you delivered, not what you achieved.”
Margaret Jackson

This does not mean every learning intervention requires a six-month study, three statisticians and a dashboard with fifteen tabs. Evaluation should be proportionate to the purpose and investment. But every L&D practitioner should understand what success was supposed to look like and what evidence would indicate that the intervention was moving in the right direction.

If I were mentoring a young African L&D professional today, particularly someone already strong in facilitation, I would encourage deliberate development in three areas: needs assessment, instructional design, and evaluation.

In simple terms: can you diagnose the need, can you design for it, and can you demonstrate whether it worked?

Facilitation sits within that chain. It does not replace it.

None of this means that every L&D practitioner must become an expert in everything. That would simply create another impossible professional standard. Some people will become excellent designers, others coaches, facilitators, evaluators, learning technologists, performance consultants or strategists, while experienced practitioners may build depth across several areas.

The more important issue is honesty about where our competence begins and ends.

I wish we were more comfortable saying, “That is not my strongest area.” Not because we lack confidence, but because we respect expertise. A facilitator should be able to say, “I can deliver this brilliantly, but I want an instructional designer involved in building it.” A designer should be able to admit that another person may facilitate a particular audience better. A coach should know when the issue in front of them is not a coaching issue at all.

That is not weakness.

That is professional maturity.

“Professional maturity is not knowing how to do everything. It is knowing what you know, what you do well, what you still need to learn and when somebody else should be in the room.”
Margaret Jackson

Organizations have a role to play too. We sometimes create what I call the Swiss Army Knife L&D job description, in which one person is expected to conduct needs assessments, design programs, facilitate, coach executives, administer the LMS, create digital learning, evaluate impact, analyze data, manage vendors, and develop strategy.

Preferably with five years’ experience.

And a salary suggesting that professional variety is apparently part of the compensation package. 😄

There is nothing wrong with an L&D generalist. Many organizations need one. But breadth and equal depth across every discipline are not the same thing.

Perhaps the question we should ask is not simply, “Are you an L&D professional?”

A much more useful question is:

“Which parts of this profession are you genuinely competent to practice, and what are you still learning?”

Because L&D is not one job. It is a profession made up of several distinct crafts, and being brilliant at one does not automatically make us brilliant at all of them.

“L&D professional” should be the beginning of the competence conversation, not the end of it.