More ≠ Better: It’s Time to Clean Your L&D Content Closet
Clean, curated content is a sign of a mature L&D function.
Most L&D teams are excellent at creating content.
We design courses. Build academies. Launch programs. Produce learning assets at an impressive pace. But there’s one thing many L&D teams are not nearly as good at.
Cleaning up what we’ve already created. And over time, that creates a problem.
A very full, very messy L&D content closet. The consequences of this messy closet situation are bigger than the lack of organization as it can slowly and quietly erode our credibility.
Inspired by last week’s L&D Must Change Podcast episode with Ger Driesen about World Learning Content Cleanup Day (March 21) #WLCCD, let’s dive deeper into this need to cleanup and curate.
The L&D Junk Drawer Problem
I remember searching a past company’s content library for resources to help a team member learn more about giving effective feedback. When my search returned pages of results, I was immediately overwhelmed.
I had landed squarely in the middle of the content junk drawer.
With little organization or curation, I found myself staring at what felt like a pile of clutter. I had no idea which content might actually be helpful, and I didn’t have time to investigate them all.
So what did I do?
I clicked out and called someone in my network to recommend their favorite resources instead.
That means I didn’t even use my own organization’s content. The content that team members had spent time and effort creating over the years.
How often does this happen in your organization? When you or your stakeholders search for something, are they overwhelmed or confused by the results? Do they spend time digging through the content to find the most relevant option?
Or do they simply click out and ask L&D to create something new?
Even worse, when we keep adding content to the figurative L&D closet without curating or organizing it, duplication becomes almost inevitable. Content gets pushed to the back, becomes outdated, rarely used, or irrelevant, but still takes up space and adds to the confusion.
In most organizations, L&D is excellent at creation, but not nearly as strong at curation and cleanup. The result is confusion, overwhelm, and sometimes inaccurate learning.
The L&D Health Check
Mature L&D functions build regular health checks into their content strategy. These reviews ensure the efficiency, effectiveness, and outcomes of their work. They intentionally maintain tidy content libraries that are easy to search, easy to use, and trusted by the organization.
But here’s the interesting part. These teams didn’t wait until they were mature to start doing this work. It actually happened the other way around. Building regular content health checks into their operations is one of the practices that helped them become more mature as a function.
Which means you don’t need to wait. You can start tidying up your content closet right away. By establishing regular processes to review and clean up your content you can:
Make content easier to find and use
Ensure accuracy and relevance
Eliminate duplication
Free up time for more strategic work
Increase trust in L&D
And over time, these habits help mature your function overall.
Establishing Your Healthy Habits
Like a New Year’s Resolution (or any good behavior change stating your intention isn’t enough. That’s only the starting point. Shedding excess content and organizing what remains takes time and commitment. Here are a few ideas to get started.
1. Start the Conversation
Cleaning up the L&D content closet is rarely a one-person job, so start by involving others right away. As you introduce this idea to your team, explain the benefits and the preferred future:
Ensure content is easily discovered and used by stakeholders
Eliminate duplication, inaccurate, and irrelevant content
Free up time for the team to focus on more strategic work
Then ask for feedback and ideas. Like any good change initiative, engagement matters.
2. Develop Action Criteria
What will trigger a decision to revise or retire content? How will you know when something has become inaccurate, outdated, or irrelevant? Just like sorting items into “keep” or “donate” piles during a closet cleanout, you need clear criteria to determine what happens next.
Some ideas to consider:
Use data as your stethoscope. Pull data from your LMS or learning platform to guide decisions. Look at things like usage and completion rates, frequency of access, age of the content, alignment with business goals
Justify keeping content. In my recent podcast conversation with Ger Driesen, founder of World Learning Content Cleanup Day (March 21), he shared a powerful mindset shift. Instead of trying to justify retiring content, assume that content will be retired unless there is a strong reason to keep it. This forces you to intentionally evaluate relevance, accuracy, usage, and risk.
Outline stakeholder involvement. L&D may not always be able to determine accuracy or relevance alone. Stakeholders and subject matter experts may need to weigh in. Determine who needs to be involved, what questions you will ask, and how often they will be consulted. Be prepared for dialogue. Stakeholders may feel protective of content they helped create, and those conversations often uncover valuable insights.
3. Create a Systematic Process
I love how my closets look after I take the time to clean them out. But without systems for putting things away and reviewing them regularly, they quickly return to the same cluttered state. The same is true for our L&D content libraries.
A one-time cleanup initiative is helpful, but without an ongoing process, the impact will be temporary. Consider creating repeatable processes such as:
Routine content reviews. This may look different depending on the type of content. In my L&D team, we reviewed technical content critical to job functions quarterly and less critical content (like leadership development curriculum) annually.
Continuous improvement expectations. Each time a synchronous course is delivered, facilitators document what worked and what needs improvement. They are also responsible for making the corresponding updates.
Feedback loops. Gather feedback from participants and stakeholders about content relevance and accuracy. Like any good feedback loop be sure you act on information received.
Content lifecycle standards. Establish guidelines for how long content can remain active before review or retirement. Evaluate content as it reaches this limit.
Clear ownership. Assign specific individuals responsibility for maintaining parts of the library. If a task belongs to everyone, it often belongs to no one and thus, won’t get done. Include completing maintenance activities as part of annual goals, at least in the beginning, for accountability as healthy habits are established.
A repeatable process with ownership and feedback is a critical part of content maturity.
4. Curation for the Win
Effective curation is almost impossible in a cluttered library. That’s why cleanup and curation should happen in succession or together.
High quality curation means someone can find what they need in two clicks and ten seconds. When that happens, they won’t click out and ask L&D to recreate something that already exists.
To begin curating:
Review common searches. Use platform data to identify the most frequently searched topics.
Guide people to only the best, most relevant content. Make it easy and do the vetting. Search results should highlight only the most useful and relevant resources.
Eliminate duplication. Merge or remove overlapping content to keep the library simple and clean.
The Bottom Line
The goal is not to have the biggest content library. The goal is to have a useful, trusted, and accessible library that employees actually use.
Too much content leads to frustrated searches and increases the risk of outdated or irrelevant learning.
It’s time for L&D to clean up our libraries in service of our organizations and the people within them. It’s time for us to improve efficiency and effectiveness, and to support the outcomes our organizations need.
So let me ask you again.
How clean is your L&D content closet?
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To learn more about how we might work together, including assessing your team’s current status with the L&D Strategic Business Partner Team Assessment and corresponding Team Development Roadmap, contact Jess today.
