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In this episode of @thehrldpodcast Nick Day is joined by John Peebles, CEO of Administrate, one of the leading voices in enterprise learning operations with over 15 years of experience helping large organizations fix the hidden chaos inside their training functions. Administrate is the number one Training Management System for instructor-led and virtual instructor-led training, trusted by enterprise teams around the world to plan, schedule, and scale complex training programs.

Together, Nick and John explore why L&D teams are more overwhelmed than ever despite having more tools than ever, and why the solution almost nobody is talking about has nothing to do with buying something new. The real problem, as John makes clear, is not technology. It is operations.

This conversation unpacks what training chaos actually looks like behind the scenes, why the more technology L&D teams add the worse things tend to get, how the absence of a true system of record is quietly killing training effectiveness, and why 70 to 80 percent of high-value corporate training still happens in a classroom regardless of what the e-learning industry has been promising for decades.

They also dig into the truth about training ROI, why up to 80 percent of the training budget is consumed by manual admin work nobody signed up for, and how fixing that frees teams to double or even triple their training throughput within a year, with downstream gains in retention and performance that most HR leaders never connect back to training operations.

On AI, John delivers one of the most grounded perspectives you will hear from any operator right now, covering where LLMs genuinely add value, where they fall short, and why operational clarity remains the real competitive advantage that winning L&D teams will be built on in 2026 and beyond.

A must-listen for HR leaders, L&D professionals, and anyone ready to stop letting fear make their decisions for them and start building the kind of courage that moves teams, careers, and organisations forward.

Enjoyed this? Check out our sister podcast @thepayrollpodcast for more great content!

Connect with John Peebles LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnjpeebles/

John Peebles Website: https://bit.ly/4dkz7mm

Nick Day's LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nickday/

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Stay tuned for the next episode of the HR L&D Podcast, brought to you by Nick Day, CEO at JGA Recruitment, landing soon!

Timestamps:

(00:00) Introduction: Is Your Training Problem Really a Technology Problem?

(01:29) Meet John Peebles: CEO of Administrate

(02:00) What Human Resources Really Means

(03:36) How John Discovered Training Operations Were Broken

(06:12) What Training Chaos Actually Looks Like Behind the Scenes

(08:18) Why More Tools Are Making Things Worse

(12:26) The Right Tool for the Right Job: A Framework for L&D Leaders

(16:24) The Case for Instructor-Led Training (The Data Might Surprise You)