One day, walking through his cornfield, farmer Ray Kinsella hears a voice that whispers, ‘If you build it, he will come’, and he sees before him a vision of a grand baseball field. To cut a long story short, he builds the baseball pitch and someone does indeed come. Slotting in at number 39 on the American Film Institute’s all-time top 100 movie quotes, this famous saying from the film Field of Dreams may seem far removed from the world of corporate learning, but as has often been noted, it is a pretty accurate picture of most corporate learning functions’ approach to marketing and branding. We build it and tend to assume that if we build it well enough, people will value it and seek our services. Or at least, that’s what we’ve done historically. Now, however, in the face of heightening demand to demonstrate the value of our work, we are increasingly having to focus on how we can more proactively manage our businesses’ perceptions of what we do.

This is a very real need because, as we have seen in previous chapters, the learning profession generally has a fairly lousy image at present. And the effect of this poor image shows in the frustrations and concerns learning leaders frequently express: that they sometimes struggle to get the take-up they need for courses, that their budgets are always the first to be cut, and that others in the business assume that learning is only about training courses, without appreciating the broader impact of what they do.