We launched the DLC Leadership Program pilot on May 4th with 84 participants across 20 countries and six continents. Alongside it we ran a pre-assessment, and the resulting community manager statistics give a clearer picture than we’ve had before of who leads digital communities, what training they’ve actually received, and where the gaps sit.
Here’s what the data showed.
Four in five participants actively hold at least one digital leadership role, and most hold them in more than one community at a time. The most common role was community manager or community specialist, followed by researcher or academic, volunteer moderator, and people manager.
They are not new to it. More than two-thirds have four or more years of experience, and a quarter have been doing this for over twelve.
They are also managing real scale. Nearly two-thirds lead gaming communities, with education, creative hobbies, and general-interest spaces close behind. More than a quarter lead a community of over 10,000 members.
And they are highly educated: over four in five hold at least a bachelor’s degree, and roughly one in six holds a doctoral or professional qualification.
That last figure makes the next one harder to explain away.
Nearly half the cohort reported receiving none or very little formal training for their digital leadership role. Only about one in five described their training as substantial. The single largest group described a mixed picture — some formal learning, heavily supplemented by whatever they could piece together themselves.
Third-party training doesn’t fill the gap either. Almost two in five had never accessed any external professional development at all. Among those who had, coverage was patchy: no single topic in our curriculum had been covered for even half the cohort.
Operational security was the least covered topic of all. Roughly one in five had ever received third-party training in it.
We asked participants to rate both how much formal training they’d received in each of eight competency areas and how confident they felt in each.
Across all eight areas, “none” was the most common training response.
The widest gaps were in creating player-facing resources, self-care and wellbeing, and operational security — each with more than four in ten reporting no formal training whatsoever.
Operational security stands out as the clearest deficit in the whole dataset. It combines one of the highest proportions reporting no training with the lowest confidence ratings of any topic: more than half placed their confidence in the bottom two points of the scale. It is the one area where neither training nor confidence has been established.
Here’s the pattern that reframes everything above.
Training ratings were uniformly low across all eight topics. Confidence ratings were consistently higher.
The comfortable reading is that people have built genuine competence through experience and self-directed learning. That may be partly true. But it’s worth holding carefully.
Confidence measures how capable someone believes they are, not how capable they are. Decades of research on self-assessment show that people who learn informally (without structured feedback, benchmarks, or exposure to best practice) can develop confidence that outpaces their actual skill.
In digital leadership that distinction has consequences. Gaps in areas like operational security or bystander intervention affect real people’s safety.
So the gap between low training and higher confidence may not be a success story about self-teaching. It may be an unmet need that has gone unrecognised, precisely because practitioners have gotten used to working without support.
As one participant put it: “I don’t know what I don’t know.”
We also asked what stands in the way. Three barriers dominated: time and workload, not knowing what was available, and cost.
Beyond those, more than a third reported no employer support or buy-in at all, and a third said the training they could find wasn’t relevant to their role. Only about one in ten reported no significant barriers.
Individual capacity, organizational culture, and supply-side gaps — all three at once. It’s why “just go get trained” has never been useful advice, and why we built the program to be free, asynchronous, and purpose-built.
We’re developing the second round of curriculum and looking for organizational partners who want to help build it. There’s no single model for what that looks like — co-producing curriculum, adapting a training your organization already runs, or something we haven’t thought of yet. If any of this catches your eye, we’d like to hear from you.
New to this? Start with the community management training gap — the research behind why this program exists.
