Corporate Learning and Development: 2025 and beyond

If you stick with me for a small part of your day today, I'd like to share with you a look at what Corporate Learning and Development will look like in the year(s) ahead for three reasons:

1. If you're not looking ahead, you're already falling behind

2. Things are changing in the industry, more quickly than ever before!

3. 2025 could be the year 'traditional' L&D dies. If it hasn't already...

As an illustration of these points, feel free to check out some research I published in the middle of 2024* - CIRcld 2024. A quick read will show you that the signs have been there for a while. Signs that whatever you've been doing in L&D today and for the last five years will not be valuable to your business in the future. And that future isn't decades away. It's not even years away. For many of you reading this, the end of your approach to L&D is mere months away.

*We're already hard at work on the 2025 analysis!

Let's dig a little deeper and turn this conjecture into a well-formed(?) article!

I'll highlight a few things:

1 - The way your organisation is changing (or needs to change) in the next 12 months

2 - The needs and expectation of the people your L&D function supports

3 - The tools and technology innovations that are driving the demand for change

4 - The sad truth about you, your function and your people

How are organisations changing in 2025?

Simply put, Skills are the way forward! And not just 'Competencies by another name' but genuine Skills.

This means the way work is organised will change. Traditional structures for planning, organising and executing core tasks will evolve. The way people think about their work and do their work will change too!

Increasingly organisations are adopting skills-based models, where the focus is on what employees can do rather than their job titles. This shift requires a re-evaluation of how roles are defined and how work is allocated. Companies like Unilever and IBM are leading the way by implementing skills-based hiring and development practices, and this has shown to improve both employee engagement and organisational agility.

Importantly, the transition to skills-based organisations isn't just a trend; it's a necessity. As automation and AI continue to evolve, the demand for specific skills over traditional roles is becoming more pronounced. In turn this is driving a rethink of workforce strategies.

In summary: The world in which your L&D function exists is not going to be the same in 6 months. It could be unrecognisable in 12 to 18 months. So get on-board or get out! Otherwise you're just in the way!

The changing needs and expectations of people in your organisation

I'm sorry to be the one to break it to you but we're not getting any younger! Millennials may now be the decision makers in many roles in an organisation but the generations who follow won't accept inefficient and ineffective working practices the way we did!

They won't tolerate sub-par technology or outdated management styles.

These new generations expect genuine learning opportunities and experiences. They'll expect meaningful development to achieve their ambitions. And they won't hang around and wait for it. As an advocate for open dialogue with workers, I believe in their right to a work-life balance and a career journey that suits them, not just their employer. And whatever your perspective on L&D, one thing is for certain - the way L&D has worked in recent years does not deliver for these kinds of expectations!

Here a deeper look a few areas L&D needs to evolve in 2025 to meet your employees' expectations:

1. Personalised employee experience

Today's workforce demands personalisation in their entire employee experience and that includes their learning and development experiences. They expect tailored learning paths that align with their career goals and personal interests. Accessible when they need it, how they prefer to consume it and in their own context, the tools to deliver this have existed for some time.

Employers who can create a holistic and personalised employee experience ecosystem will lead the way in the years ahead and anyone bogged down in bureaucracy and poor decision making will find they no longer appeal to the next generation's high-performers!

If you couple this shift in expectations with the shift towards skills-based organisations then the simple truth is - your people have different needs now and if you're not already solving for this, you're already letting them down!

2. Technology Innovations

The advent of AI assistants, improvements in automation and innovations in technology will fundamentally transform all roles in your organisation (whether you're ready to accept it or not!) - And the highest impact will be felt by those in office-based roles.

For decades those working in shop-floor or production line roles have seen their numbers dwindle with their jobs being transformed through robotics and other innovations.

In the office, however, beyond smaller devices, and trendier environments it would be easy to consider that all other aspects of the work have remained unchanged for decades - particularly when you consider the apparent 'clunkiness' of systems and tools in many organisations. I know first-hand how some of the world's biggest and most innovative brands are still using Command-Line based systems for critical tasks when many technologies in the last 20 years have existed to do the same thing more effectively and efficiently.

So when considering the future of an L&D function it would be easy to assume that we're thinking about just 'system' training with AI & Automation being new tools when in fact these tools will begin to remove the transactional aspects of individuals' work and enable specialists to leverage their true skills thanks to the time saved with new technologies.

This means the expectation of L&D will pivot further away from general 'content-first' and high-volume deployment more towards personalised experiences to deliver genuine skills development.

3. L&D capabilities

The truth is that the demands of L&D and the role of many specialists within L&D is already changing. Decentralised models leveraging SMEs from across an organisation has transferred a significant chunk of 'Design' work away from L&D. Leader-led & SME-led coaching and facilitation has removed much of the 'Delivery' work from traditional L&D functions.

The Shared Service model has also removed much of the Technical Administration & Configuration for Learning Platforms from L&D too.

This has lead to somewhat of an identity crisis for many L&D functions, with leaders and specialists alike searching around to understand their real place in an organisation.

I mean, if everyone else is doing the work L&D used to do, what's the point of L&D? And that's a serious question! Your people will expect L&D people to be experts not generalists - they have Google for that! So you need to level up your L&D capability and fast!

In summary: What your people expect today and tomorrow is significantly different to what previous generations expected from their employers. For L&D this requires a fundamental change in the purpose, the output, the impact and capabilities of the function. Because so much of 'traditional' L&D specialisms can be delivered by generalists, leaders, technology or external partners, any L&D function still resisting change by mid-2025 will not live to see 2026...

So - what can your L&D leaders do in 2025?

It's important to realise that L&D should only exist, in any form, where it adds value. So the first thing your L&D leadership must do is determine whether L&D (in any configuration) will actually add value to your organisation. If the answer is an negative one, then great leaders will acknowledge that L&D should be no more.

Where there is a definitive need to an L&D function/team etc. then there are at least three critical steps in making sure your L&D function is delivering something meaningful in 2025:

1. Be crystal clear about what your L&D purpose is

2. Prioritise impact & value over volume

3. Build skills, not content

   
   

Let's break that down a little further into something actionable that you and your team can deliver in 2025.

1 - Your L&D Purpose

This is the first and most important piece. And it'll be different for every L&D function.

The three key actions here are:

• Connect with your business stakeholders to understand how they see L&D contributing to their business area and the organisation as a whole. In one sentence.

• Connect with your people to understand what they see their individual and collective L&D contribution to the business.

• Come together as a team and reflect on this to define what the purpose of your L&D function is.

2 - Prioritise impact & value over volume

This is technically the easiest, but psychologically one of the most difficult things to do.

In it's simplest form, just stop doing things for which there is no measurable impact/value/benefit to the organisation. This might be delivering 'refresher' training that could just as easily be delivered by an operational SME. Or it could be halting the development of any digital content that has a niche/low-volume target audience.

These things feel like common sense but if, like many, your L&D function has come to rely on these things to justify their existence, then the conversations with your team & stakeholders to make this happen may feel difficult. But trust me - if you're doing things like this, most people probably think L&D is a waste of money anyway...

Here are three simple actions you can take to get moving on this shift:

• Identify any activities your team are doing that have little to no measurable impact/value/benefit.

• Stop doing them

• Re-deploy your team onto activities that solve real business issues and/or develop the skills your business needs.

3 - Build skills not content

I'm going to boldly assume that any 'major' programmes your L&D team 'delivers' are usually delivered by external vendors. This leads me to then assume that most of your L&D team's actual output is centred on content development of 'Knowledge Acquisition' training.

In these cases, you're probably spending a LOT of time creating content that tells people something - and it may have some pretty pictures or animations too? Even an AI video here and there...

But this isn't developing skills. It's just regurgitating something people would be able to find themselves on Google.

In short, you and your people are wasting your time.

So stop. Today. And pivot towards developing skills. And while some core knowledge is required for this, most skills development does not happen by watching a video, reading a document or even listening to a colleague talk at them (with some fun 'learning activities' here and there) for a couple of hours.

Meaningful skills development happens when people have a problem to solve. Whether that's building a wall, creating a graph on a spreadsheet or having a difficult performance management conversation.

So here's a few actions you and your L&D team could take to build skills in 2025:

• Understand the biggest skills-gap in your organisation (it likely to be something related to Leadership/Digital capability)

• Go speak to people with these skills and discover what they found most useful in developing the skills

• Down tools on your mass-content creation and re-deploy your people onto creating experiences and opportunities you know will develop critical skills for your business

In summary: There are many things you could do in 2025 to elevate the impact of your L&D function and genuinely support your business. Some are easy, others no so. Regardless, doing nothing is not the answer!

In conclusion

2025 brings dramatic shifts in the work people do, the way work is organised and the expectations of employees. L&D must face into these changes and evolve, rapidly, to ensure they're not simply a drain on stretched budgets and can actually drive meaningful skills development at all levels of an organisation.

If you're not already doing something, it may already be too late...

About the Author - And Apples Performance and Learning

This is where you usually get the obligatory profile, and pitch - feel free to skip it, but I'd rather you didn't. If you've read one of my posts before, this next bit will be familiar :).

Hi. I'm Andy. I'd rather not bore you with a profile, when you can find out what you need here. So take a look, or don't, I'll never know either way!

Also - I could give you a really slick 'sales pitch' about how Apples Performance and Learning can help you navigate through the minefield that is L&D powered Skills Development & Performance Improvement. But I won't. To be frank, this post is already too long, and I'm bored of my own 'voice'. If you want to know how we can help you - check this out, or this.

Beyond that, if you've made it this far, thank you for sticking with me. Hopefully you agree with my post and find some value in it. If not, please feel free to correct my perspectives - I won't learn anything new otherwise! andy@aplconsulting.co.uk