Fractional L&D
A fraction of a person is easy. A fraction of a function is the hard part.
The phrase borrows from fractional finance chiefs, where the thing being divided is one person’s week. Talent development is seven jobs and they do not all divide the same way. Here is which ones do, which ones do not, and what the arrangement costs.
What the term means
Fractional L&D, defined.
A fractional executive is a person you rent part of. One finance chief, four companies, a day or two each. It works because the job travels: the same judgment applied to a different set of books. Fractional L&D borrows the phrase and immediately runs into a problem, which is that talent development is not one person. It is seven jobs, and only some of them are a calendar.
Design the material. Deliver it live. Enroll and schedule. Remind and follow up. Coach between sessions. Review the applied work. Report what changed. A fractional consultant sells you a share of the second one and leaves the other six exactly where they were. That is why a lot of what is sold as fractional L&D turns out on inspection to be a facilitator on a day rate with a better name.
Why this costs the same at two hundred people as at ten thousand →
How Thrive fits
Which jobs divide, and which refuse to.
The jobs that divide well are the expensive ones. Material is designed once and used by everyone, so the cost per company falls with each company added. Live delivery divides by seat: public cohorts and a published workshop schedule put your four supervisors in a room with somebody else’s six, which is how an enterprise fills a classroom and how a company of two hundred never could. Administration divides best of all, because agents do it and serving one more organization costs close to nothing.
Two jobs refuse, and pretending otherwise is where these arrangements fail. Reviewing the applied work belongs to the participant’s own manager, because the whole effect depends on somebody who sees them at work seeing them apply it. Deciding who goes next belongs to you, because we do not know which supervisor is about to lose their best operator. Any provider claiming those two is selling something it cannot deliver.
Who arrives at this page
- A company of two hundred that has run the numbers on a full-time L&D hire and could not make the second half of the salary work.
- An HR leader holding a good consultant’s day rate who cannot see a route from one day to a program.
- A finance lead who wants development to be a known number rather than a series of approvals arriving one at a time.
The same function is also searched for as Outsourced L&D and L&D as a service. Different argument, same product.
The arithmetic
What the fraction actually is.
Not a share of one person’s week. A share of each cost that would otherwise have been yours alone.
The material
Written once, used by every company on the platform, and grown from what people ask for. Your share of that design cost is the reason one hundred thirty-six courses across four libraries is not a budget line somebody had to defend.
The classroom
A live session needs enough people in it to be worth a facilitator’s afternoon. Public workshops pool them across companies, so four of your supervisors can sit in a room of twenty-five without you finding the other twenty-one. Sixteen topics run this way.
The administration
Morgan sets the organization up. Coach Taylor enrolls people when they ask. Agents are the one part of this list where serving one more company genuinely costs close to nothing, which is what lets the price be flat rather than per seat.
The coach
A human coach divides by the hour and gets expensive quickly, which is why per-person coaching reaches the executive team and stops. Coach Taylor does not divide that way, so coaching between sessions reaches every manager rather than the two the budget stretched to.
The compliance floor
Fifty-six of the courses are free at any size, for any company, including ones that never pay us anything. Compliance is the cheapest part of the library to share and the part nobody is allowed to skip, so it sits outside the price entirely rather than inside the cheapest band.
The job that has not divided yet
Reminding people and chasing them is the seventh job and it is not automated here. Coach Taylor answers when somebody asks. It does not go and find the supervisor who has not booked. Scheduled reminders are on the roadmap and are not in the product today, so for now that job falls to whoever at your company cares most. Everything else on this page already runs.
The seven jobs
Who carries each one, at each size.
The middle column is the company this page is written for. Read down it and the case for dividing the function is made before any of our copy is.
Someone owns it Covered when there is time Nobody
Someone owns it Covered when there is time Nobody
A department
Salaries, and we are not going to quote you someone else's. You have hired before.
Nothing on the invoice
Which is not the same as free. The seven jobs get absorbed into other people's weeks, or they do not get done.
$799 a month
Flat for any organization of 101-500 employees, every employee included. $7,990 for a year. Printed on the pricing page.
Who teaches
Held the job. Not studied it.
Content is the easy part to buy. A dozen vendors will sell you a library this afternoon. What none of them sells is the person who has already done the job, live, for two hours, watching your people practice it.
Every Thrive session is led by someone who has done the work they are teaching: run a shift, carried a quota, managed a team through a change, sat across from the person who needed the hard conversation. They bring the real version of the problem into the room, and the practice is done on your people’s actual work, not on a case study.
Sessions are small enough that a facilitator can watch each person practice and coach the delivery. Between sessions, Coach Taylor keeps the thread going.
- Session size
- 25 max
- Length
- 2 hours
- Format
- Live
- Where
- Teams
The price
One flat price for the whole organization.
The band is set by how many people you employ, and that is the only thing it sets. Nothing is metered, nothing is held back for a higher band, and adding people inside your band costs nothing. Cohort programs are the one line priced per participant, because a facilitator and a fixed group size are a real constraint.
| Organization size | Monthly | Annual | Per person, per month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Compliance LibraryAny size, no card | Free | Free | Nothing, at any size. |
| Thrive Platformup to 100 employees | $399 | $3,990 | $3.99 at 100 people, and less every time you hire inside the band. |
| Thrive Platform101-500 employees | $799 | $7,990 | $1.60 at 500 people, and less every time you hire inside the band. |
| Thrive Platform501-2,500 employees | $1,499 | $14,990 | $0.60 at 2,500 people, and less every time you hire inside the band. |
| Above 2,500 employees | Set with you, not looked up. Usually with private cohorts of your own. | ||
This table has no column for what is included, because the answer does not change by band: live workshops, all one hundred thirty-six courses across four libraries with fifty-six of those free in the compliance library, Coach Taylor for every learner, Morgan for setup, and the reporting. Annual billing is ten months charged for twelve months of access. A monthly plan is one month, charged once; nothing renews on its own yet.
Talk to ARIA
Ask what you would ask us.
ARIA works the way a good first call works. She asks who is involved and what should change, recommends the closest starting point, quotes the real price, and hands you to a person when you want one.
Start with one of these
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Questions
Questions about fractional l&d.
What is fractional L&D?
A talent development function a company uses part of instead of hiring one. The function is seven jobs: designing the material, delivering it live, enrolling and scheduling, reminding and following up, coaching between sessions, reviewing the applied work, and reporting what changed. A fractional arrangement covers the ones that can be shared across companies and is paid for as a fraction rather than as headcount.
Which parts of an L&D function can really be shared?
Material, because it is written once and used by everyone. Live delivery, because public sessions pool seats across companies the way an enterprise pools them across departments. Administration, because agents do it and one more organization costs close to nothing. Coaching between sessions, because Coach Taylor is not billed by the hour.
Which parts cannot be shared?
Reviewing applied work, which belongs to the participant’s own manager because the point is that somebody who sees them at work sees them apply it. And deciding who to develop next, which belongs to you because we do not know your people. Both stay on your side, and both are stated before you buy rather than discovered after.
How is this different from hiring a fractional L&D consultant?
A consultant is one person’s calendar, priced by the day, and the function stops when the day ends. This is a standing arrangement: workshops already on a published schedule, a leadership program with the next cohort date on the site, a library that grows from requests, and agents doing the administration, at a flat price per organization printed on the pricing page.