Jessica,
Prior to me being hired last August, our organization also only had one L and D Manager for 1800 employees. When I was hired as Director, they also hired a support role which tripled the size of our department. Our manager, who was previously the only L and D staff member, keeps reiterating how much we have been able to do in the past 11 months with two extra hands on deck. Rather than being reactive and only completing compliance tasks, we now have a strategic goals, unified policies and procedures, and have been able to launch several initiatives that would only have previously been dreamed about. We also absorbed our training team under the Learning and Development Department which has 4 staff focused on programmatic trainings. That has also supported our unified processes.