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AITD CAPABILITY FRAMEWORK
Know Your Strengths, Grow Your Impact
Australia's comprehensive L&D capability framework - built by the community, for the community.
The AITD Capability Framework is your roadmap to professional L&D excellence. Developed with input from over 160 L&D professionals and validated across diverse sectors, this framework helps you reflect on your capabilities, set career objectives, and create targeted development plans.
The framework is regularly refined and reviewed. It’s mapped against mainstream L&D roles and provides supporting resource kits and course recommendations to help you shape your own unique development pathway.
Built by L&D professionals. For L&D professionals.
Framework Overview
Your Complete Professional Development Framework
The AITD Capability Framework is the Australian L&D sector’s comprehensive guide to core capabilities linked to effective learning and development practice.
It offers a blueprint and common language to guide practitioners in evolving L&D career pathways and capabilities. It provides a universal approach that can be interpreted and actioned within most L&D sectors, e.g., government, corporate, consulting, education and services providers. The framework defines 31 capabilities across seven interconnected categories, each described at three proficiency levels - Foundational, Intermediate, and Advanced.
Grounded in professional values and ethics, the framework is underpinned by AITD's values of Leading, Connecting, and Sharing, and aligned with the AITD Code of Ethics and Professional Practice.
The framework has been developed by L&D practitioners, for L&D practitioners, and is available as part of your AITD membership package. Whether you're just starting your L&D career, leading a team, or running your own consultancy, these capabilities provide a framework for professional growth and excellence.
“All of the elements in there really resonated with me - the capabilities were articulated really well.” Julie Hemington, Senior Learning Architect
Capability Categories
Core Practitioner Capability includes essential skills for all L&D professionals such as evidence-informed practice, digital literacy, and AI literacy.
Strategy and Partnering involves building strategic partnerships that align learning with business goals and position L&D as trusted advisors.
Operations involves managing operational functions and resources, and develop high-performing L&D teams.
Learning Solution Design involves Designing, developing and curating engaging, inclusive learning experiences that drive performance improvement.
Learning Facilitation involves facilitating effective learning across diverse environments using varied tools, techniques and delivery modes.
Evaluation and Impact involves evaluating and improving learning initiatives through data-driven insights and analytics.
Learning Culture involves championing and integrating practices that foster continuous learning at all organisational levels.
Framework Principles
The AITD Capability Framework is built on 10 design principles. Click here to expand and view.
| Principle | Description |
| Comprehensive | The framework covers all critical skills required in an L&D function and applies to both internal L&D professionals and external consultants and suppliers. |
| Flexible | The framework applies to L&D professionals across diverse organisational contexts and sectors, recognising that relevance of specific capabilities varies across contexts. |
| Useful | Capabilities help L&D practitioners to perform their roles more effectively today. |
| Behavioural focus | Capabilities are expressed as observable behaviours. |
| Emergent | Capabilities equip L&D practitioners to adapt to the evolving needs of the profession (2-5 years). |
| Sustainable | Capabilities are expressed in a way that emphasises enduring knowledge and skills and does not rely on specific frameworks, models or tools. |
| Simple | The framework and capability descriptions are as simple and accessible as possible, while still capturing the complexity of the work. |
| Unique | Capabilities are distinct and non-overlapping. |
| Unambiguous | Language is clear and concise. |
| Ethics and Values | Capabilities are underpinned by the standards of professional conduct outlined in the AITD Code of Ethics and Professional Practice, and reflect our values of Leading, Connecting and Sharing. |
These aim to underpin an agile, practical approach to developing core capabilities that prepare practitioners for future shifts in L&D, and practical application - ensuring the framework stays current, vibrant and serves L&D professionals no matter their career stage. It also allows for a team-based approach to developing L&D practitioners in small to large organisations. This accommodates a wide variety of roles, responsibilities and experience levels.
“I can see this framework becoming a go-to blueprint for practitioners navigating the complex world of workforce L&D.” Kade Brown, RMIT Online
Community Story
Australia's Community-Built Framework
Co-created by the L&D community - Commencing from initial research by AITD, over thirty L&D professionals joined seven working groups - one for each capability category. These groups to crafted the practical capability framework, mapping their work against various models and theories. An experienced editorial team worked to develop consistency, framework coherence and alignment to the ten guiding design principles.
Appendix – list of Working Group members
- Project Sponsor: Ben Campbell
- Project Lead: Michelle Ockers
- Project Editor: Lisa Elias
- Project Test and Validation Lead: Neil Coulson
- Amanda Ashby
- Joseph Atkinson
- Shai Desai
- Kate Fraser
- Jemai Duque Gomez
- Beth Hall
- Sally Hawse
- Marilyn Hubner
- Richa Jain
- Angela King
- Millie Law
- Catriona Malcolm
- Isabel Malferrari
- Carly Middap
- Andrew Napier
- Samantha Noonan
- Jane Phillips
- Jane Richardson
- Nick Rouen
- Lee Roulston
- Megan Silenge
- Merinda Smith
- Kate Smyth
- Belinda Wetenhall
- Zoe Youl
Rigorously validated across sectors - Thirty L&D leaders participated in sector-specific focus groups representing corporate, government, not-for-profit, and industry supplier perspectives. These sessions validated the framework's relevance across different organisational contexts and provided important feedback to help refine the framework to ensure clarity to a range of sector contexts.
Extensively tested by practitioners - One hundred L&D professionals from diverse sectors, roles, and experience levels tested the framework by completing self-assessments and providing detailed feedback. This feedback provided important additional insights to finalise the framework, ensuring it gained additional robustness and strength. The result is a well-regarded living document to build conversation, learning pathways and capability development for most sectors, roles and career stages.
YOUR DEVELOPMENT JOURNEY
Three Steps to Professional Growth
Step 1: Self-Assess
Discover where you stand across all 31 capabilities
Assess your proficiency level using concrete behavioural indicators. Identify your strengths and development opportunities across all aspects of L&D practice.
Step 2: Set Career Objectives
Compare your profile to target roles and set development goals
See how your current capabilities align with your career aspirations. The platform gives you the information you need to decide where to focus your development efforts for maximum impact.
Step 3: Create Development Plan
Access curated learning resources and track your progress
Browse curated learning activities aligned to your objectives, create your personalised development plan, and track your progress over time.
"This framework is a huge value add... it helps L&D leaders have development conversations with their people that align with business strategy." - Emily Black, Learning and Organisational Development Manager
Why This Matters
Advance Your L&D Career with Confidence
Get Started in L&D
Build a solid foundation from early career
New to L&D? The AITD Capability Framework illustrates a broad overview of the major capabilities prized by the profession and employers. It helps identify the foundations of professional competence and growth, together which areas you might choose to focus in on in your early L&D career pathway. AITD aims to help you identify core capabilities to build on first, potentially saving many years of trial and error.
Build Your Career Path
Clear direction for your next move
Whether you're aiming for L&D team leadership, wanting to specialise in a particular area of L&D practice, or considering a move to consulting, the AITD Capability Framework helps guide you to the capabilities that most closely match your career goals. In this way, the framework provides a practical, peer-guided roadmap to help you prioritise what is needed for effective L&D practice and capabilities valued by L&D leaders.
Strengthen Your Professional Standing
Credible development you can talk about with confidence
The AITD Capability Framework assists you to build your credentials with capabilities that are recognised across sectors and by credible L&D professionals who value the work that AITD has coordinated for the benefit of the profession. With the capability assessment and targeted development that our platform supports, you can illustrate and articulate your growth and development to important stakeholders, including employers, clients and peers . As an added bonus, you can keep track of your growth through development documents and your AITD Continuous Professional Development (CPD) portal record.
Stay Relevant and Future-Ready
Develop skills for tomorrow's L&D challenges
The L&D landscape is evolving rapidly. From impact of AI to changing employer and client expectations, the framework helps you build capabilities for a dynamic and exciting future. We will help you to stay focused on building the capabilities that matter most for an ever-changing world.
Getting Started
Ready to Begin Your Development Journey?
For Current AITD Members
Your framework is ready to use
- Log into the AITD website at aitd.com.au
- Click on ‘My Account’ in the top menu area
- Click on 'Capability Assessment' in the Welcome menu
- Accept the platform terms on your first login
- Start your self-assessment
For Future AITD Members
Join AITD to access the framework
The AITD Capability Framework is currently available as a member benefit as part of our mutual commitment to supporting L&D professional development through the continuous evolution of the framework by our members.
"I think I'd probably say 95% of [the capabilities] are really relevant to our teams... my first impression was it's got a lot of value to offer and covers lots of ground." - Janine Davidson, L&D Leader, Technical Training
Support Resources
- AITD Companion Guide: Download guidance for completing your assessment and development planning.
- Technical Support: Complete the contact from. Select ‘Capability Assessment query’.
- Framework Questions and Feedback: Complete the contact form. Select ‘Capability Assessment Query’.
Team Benefits
Build High-Performing L&D Teams
Team Capability Mapping
Understand your team's collective strengths and gaps
Teams that are AITD corporate members can access reporting dashboards that provide a central view with aggregate team reporting across all 31 capabilities. Amongst a multitude of benefits, this will help team leaders understand their team’s collective capability profile and identify where best to enhance team capability and focus.
Strategic Workforce Planning
Align team development with business goals
The team functionality on the AITD platform helps you map a growth direction for future capability needs to support your goals. For example, you might review capabilities against current or future job roles or project responsibilities, and set development goals or organisational development strategies to maximise your staff training and development plans.
Performance Conversations That Matter
Development discussions grounded in industry standards
Whether using this tool to support internal development, or as a consulting tool, the AITD Capability Framework will help facilitate positive, focused conversations around recognised capabilities. These support both team goals and individual aspirations, with each capability mapped to a variety of development resources – from free materials to courses, webinars and journals, including a wide variety of AITD resources and networks.
Getting Started with Team Functionality
Whether your group is 2 or 200, the team capability tool is available to all AITD members, with inbuilt reporting functionality that scales according to team size.
Not yet a member? Learn about the full benefits of membership, including additional options available for teams through our corporate membership package.
Contact us about corporate membership or team functionality.
Capability assessment platform information
We'd like to thank Lexonis for partnering with AITD on this initiative.
Lexonis brings over 20 years of real-world competency experience, helping businesses worldwide build better teams through their deep understanding of successful competency projects. As specialists in skills-based talent management, they've been at the forefront of competency management longer, delivering solutions that help organisations understand their workforce capabilities and align talent with business strategy.
