The Community Management Training Gap: What Digital Leaders Told Us They Need
A needs assessment of community managers and moderators in games reveals a profession doing critical work with almost no formal training—and what it's costing both leaders and their communities.
Ask most people what a community manager does and you'll hear some version of "they delete the bad posts." It's a stubborn misconception, and it's part of why community management training barely exists as a field. If the job is just removing content, the thinking goes, then what is there really to train (apart from friendly chats good, hate speech bad?).
But that's not the job. To understand what digital community leaders actually do (and what they need to do it well) we asked 25 community managers and moderators working in games (you can find the full report here). What they told us describes a profession that has quietly matured into something far more complex than moderation, while the support around it hasn't caught up at all.
The headline finding was that most community managers receive no formal training in the core competencies their roles demand, and more than half have already faced situations in their communities they felt unprepared to handle. This is the gap that good community management training has to close.
Community managers are doing far more than content moderation
When we asked these leaders to define their own roles, almost none described themselves as content moderators. Instead, five distinct identities emerged. They are connectors, brokering understanding between members, and between their community and the organization behind it. They are curators, actively designing community culture rather than passively policing it. They are custodians, responsible for emotional and physical safety, inclusion, and accessibility. They are champions, advocating for their members and amplifying quieter voices. And they are cultivators, building the trust and relationships that hold a community together.
The various roles that digital leaders hold in their work (Kowert, 2025)
These aren't soft metaphors. They describe a job that draws on psychology, conflict resolution, cultural design, and communication—often all in the same afternoon. The conversations these leaders navigate bear that out, as in the communities these leaders led only about half of all discussions taking place there were actually about the game. The rest ranged across creative work, pop culture, practical questions, and (for more than one in ten interactions) members' personal lives and genuinely sensitive topics. The people managing those spaces are fielding mental-health disclosures and interpersonal crises, not just spam.
Most community managers get no formal training
Here's where the infrastructure gap becomes impossible to ignore.We gave these leaders a list of skills the role actually demands (from setting community guidelines and de-escalating conflict to safeguarding member wellbeing, managing their own boundaries, and finding support for themselves) and asked how much formal training they'd received in each before starting. For nearly every skill on that list, more than half reported receiving none at all. The deepest gaps were in exactly the areas you'd most want someone supported: 82% had received no training in finding support networks for themselves, and 74% had none in assessing the health of their own communities.
The consequences are predictable. More than half (56%) said they had encountered a situation in their community they felt unprepared to handle. These are people responsible for the wellbeing of thousands of members, learning the hardest parts of the job in real time, on their own.
What community managers actually need to learn
We also asked these leaders to rank what they most need from future community management training. Their priorities were clear and consistent.
Safety came first. Handling threats, harassment, and toxicity was the single most-prioritized training need—the only topic a majority placed in their top three. Close behind were developing and enforcing community guidelines, and community engagement: building relationships and re-activating members who've drifted away.
Unsurprisingly, their list of priorities lined up with the skills leaders feel least equipped for - safety, support networks, wellbeing, and the technical and interpersonal tools that surround them. The demand isn't abstract. It maps directly onto where people are struggling.
The hidden cost: burnout and a value disconnect
Doing high-stakes work without preparation takes a toll, and the data shows it. More than half of these leaders reported feeling worn out by the end of their workday (52%) and burned out because of their work (56%).
Underneath the burnout sits a quieter, more corrosive problem: a clear disconnect between impact and recognition. When we asked these leaders how important their role is in shaping community culture, the average answer was 4.7 out of 5. They know their influence. But when we asked how valued they feel by their organizations, the average dropped to 3.5. They shape the culture of digital spaces every day, and they don't feel their organizations see it.
The self-reliance trap
To their credit, community managers aren't waiting to be rescued. Nearly all of them (96%) have sought out professional development on their own initiative. The problem is what's available to find. Three out of four (74%) rate their company's training as inadequate, and 60% say the same of third-party offerings.
So leaders are left to self-train—and self-reliance, however admirable, is a broken model. It puts the burden of identifying, accessing, and funding development on individuals. It assumes people can accurately diagnose their own gaps, which is nearly impossible when, as one pilot participant in the DLC Leadership Program put it, "you don't know what you don't know." It makes quality training a function of who can afford it and find the time. And without shared standards, the field can't guarantee consistent, safe practice across communities at all.
The appetite is there. 83% of these leaders say continued education is very or extremely important to them, and not one rated it unimportant. What's missing isn't motivation. It's infrastructure.
What good community management training looks like
The same leaders told us how they'd want to learn, and the answer points the way forward. They favor cohort-based learning with taught modules and group activities, paired with practical, applied resources. And they need flexibility. That is, training that is asynchronous, low-pressure, and accessible across time zones and schedules, so they can engage as capacity allows.
In other words, effective community management training has to be evidence-based, built around the competencies leaders actually use, delivered in a format that fits demanding lives, and tied to a credential that makes this work legible as a profession. It has to treat safety, wellbeing, and the human dimensions of the role as core curriculum, not afterthoughts.
This is solvable. Community management is complex, high-stakes work that is critical to the safety, resilience, and sustainability of digital spaces. It deserves the same professional infrastructure - standardized training, recognized credentials, and real support networks—that other fields take for granted. Right now it doesn't have that. Building it is the work ahead.
So we built it and it's working
This research isn't abstract to us, it is the blueprint we used to build the DLC Leadership Program, a free, evidence-based community management training and certification designed around exactly the needs these leaders named. The competencies they ranked highest (i.e., safety, community guidelines, engagement) sit at the heart of the curriculum, right alongside the things the data shows they're rarely trained in but urgently need, including self-care, operational security, finding support networks, and protecting their own wellbeing while they protect everyone else's.
And it works. We've just closed our pilot cohort with 41 certified graduates, who lead communities that reach more than 100,000 members. By the time the program ended, 85% of graduates had already changed how they lead. That is, putting new practices to work in real communities, in real time. Graduates left more confident across every competency we measured and nearly all say they'd recommend it to other community leaders. The full impact data is coming soon, and it's the clearest evidence yet that this gap can be closed.
The demand speaks for itself as our waitlist is growing. People doing this work have been waiting a long time for someone to take it seriously and to give them somewhere to go.
If you lead a digital community, consider this your invitation to join the waitlist and be part of the next cohort.
And if you're an organization that depends on healthy communities (a studio, a platform, a publisher) this is your chance to help build the infrastructure the field has been missing. Partner with us to help set the standard for the future of community management training.
This article draws on "Train Them or Lose Them (Both): A Needs Assessment for Digital Leadership in Games," a survey of 25 community managers and moderators conducted in September 2025. The DLC Leadership Program is a free, evidence-based community management training and certification for moderators, community managers, and guild leaders. Learn more at dlcleadership.org.
