If you work in a small or medium-sized business (SME), chances are ‘L&D team’ really means… you, whether you have L&D experience or not.
You might be in HR, operations or even marketing. You care about your people and you know training is important, but you don’t have time to become an instructional designer on top of everything else. You’re an accidental L&D manager, but without the time, budget or expertise to conjure up award-winning elearning out of thin air.
The good news? With modern AI authoring tools and a few smart approaches, SMEs can create high-quality, engaging elearning without specialist L&D expertise.
Here’s how you can create high-quality elearning in a way that’s practical, manageable and 100% realistic.
Before we talk solutions, let’s acknowledge the real challenges SMEs face when it comes to creating great learning content.
In many SMEs, one person handles HR, onboarding, compliance, wellbeing and sometimes payroll. Learning often gets squeezed in between everything else. It’s not the top priority, and it may not even be the fifth priority – it’s just another plate that needs to be kept spinning.
You might know what employees need to learn – but structuring it into an engaging course? Writing assessments? Designing learning objectives? That can feel intimidating if you have no previous experience in L&D, and have just inherited it alongside your actual area of expertise.
Building a course from scratch can take days (or weeks). One-person ‘L&D teams’ within SMEs don’t have that luxury. In a standard week, you may be juggling HR enquiries, payroll, getting invoices processed on time, updating the employee handbook, ensuring everyone is up to date with their compliance training, onboarding new hires and screening candidates for vacant roles. How on earth are you supposed to find time to create a professional-quality elearning course to close a skills gap on top of all that?
People who end up inheriting L&D responsibilities are usually very conscientious and take pride in their work. You don’t want to create training that feels rushed, dull or thrown together. But high production value has traditionally required specialist authoring tools and expertise.
This is exactly where AI and modern content tools change the game.
If L&D falls under your remit, but you’re not a specialist with dedicated time to focus on content creation, the good news is that it’s easier than ever before to build high-impact elearning courses.
Let’s explore some of the options open to you.
Best for: Turning ideas into structured courses quickly
AI-powered authoring tools like 5app’s VeeCreate are designed for people who aren’t instructional designers.
Instead of staring at a blank screen, you can:
AI doesn’t replace your expertise – it accelerates it. You still bring the context, culture and accuracy to keep the human in the loop and keep things looking and sounding right. The AI authoring tool then helps with structure, clarity and flow.
For SMEs with limited capacity, this can turn a week-long task into something achievable in an afternoon.
Best for: Reducing workload immediately
Most SMEs already have valuable learning content – it just isn’t packaged as elearning yet.
Look at:
Instead of creating from scratch, repurpose what you’ve already got to avoid reinventing the wheel.
AI tools like VeeCreate can transform existing documents into structured, interactive learning modules through a simple file upload. This saves time and ensures your training reflects real, current business knowledge, without requiring a huge amount of manual effort to extract content from PDFs or PowerPoints and get it into an engaging, interactive format.
Best for: Busy teams with limited development time
One common mistake SMEs make is assuming training has to be long and comprehensive... but it doesn’t.
Short, focused modules – 5 to 10 minutes each – are often more effective and far easier to build. And let’s face it – hour-long elearning courses aren’t popular with anyone.
For example, if we take the ‘Effective customer conversations’ example from above, this could be broken down into multiple microlearning modules:
Microlearning reduces development pressure and makes training easier for employees to fit into their day. It also means you can release content as it’s ready, ensuring there’s a constant drip-feed of fresh content to keep people engaged rather than waiting for a full-length course to be ready.
Best for: Avoiding knowledge loss
In SMEs, knowledge often lives in people’s heads. No L&D professional can be expected to know everything an SME knows, and that’s even more relevant when L&D is just one of the many hats you wear.
No L&D professional is an island, and your internal SMEs are there to help you. But time is precious, and there are several ways to capture the information you need as painlessly as possible.
Instead of asking managers to ‘write training’ (which, let’s face it, could take weeks of chasing), try:
Then use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude or Perplexity to structure and polish that knowledge into learning content, which can then go back to the SME for review and approval.
This approach makes SMEs contributors, not content creators, which removes friction and saves time.
Looking for more AI tools to make your life as an accidental L&D manager easier? Then look no more with our ultimate list of AI tools for L&D!
Best for: Reducing perfection paralysis
One of the biggest blockers for SMEs is thinking training has to be perfect before launch – but don’t let perfect get in the way of good.
Start with:
Then just launch it, gather feedback and improve it – simple. Don’t get caught up trying to design the perfect images or coming up with 50 different quiz questions for the first version – you can always make those improvements later.
With AI authoring tools like VeeCreate and modern, intuitive learning platforms like 5app’s Hub, updating content is quick and easy. Elearning content becomes something you refine and improve over time, not something you build once and never touch again.
If you’re a one-person HR or operations team taking responsibility for learning, here’s a realistic process you can follow:
That’s it – no instructional design qualification required, and minimal stress.
AI levels the playing field.
It allows small and medium businesses to:
For SMEs, this isn’t about replacing people – it’s about empowering the people you already have, whether or not they’re experienced in learning creation.
Creating elearning courses used to require specialist software, instructional design expertise and significant time investment.
Today, SMEs can combine:
The result? High-quality, practical training, created quickly, without overwhelming you or taking you away from your other tasks.
Learning doesn’t have to be complicated. It just has to start