The Skills Every L&D Team Needs in 2026

Updated: October 2026

I’ve been writing a yearly analysis of the skills L&D teams and solo operators need for the past 8 years.

This sits alongside my yearly series on the anatomy of an L&D team. They’re basically a tag-team of playbooks to help you stay at the cutting edge of work today by investing in the right capabilities and skills.

Usually, I do a whole thing on the old L&D model, team structure and roles within it.

Yet, like almost all industries in 2026, AI has ripped most of that apart. We’re pretty clear on that, so I won’t waste time this year covering old ground. Instead, let’s focus on the now and what you can do to shape the future of your team and career.

To start, let’s unpack how I collected all the data and insights shared here.

The skills and capabilities 200 L&D teams believe you need to deliver meaningful business impact

[Note: Each % is the share of respondents who named that skill, or any skill in that area. Most people named several, so the percentages add up to more than 100%.]

As I have tens of thousands of eyeballs on my work (which is both exhilarating and terrifying), this gives me access to a huge network of professionals, and it feels pretty stupid not to ask all those people what skills they believe teams and solo operators in our industry need right now.

So that’s exactly what I did.

What I asked and what I discovered

Across 3 months (June – September), 200 L&D teams answered one simple free text question: “What skills do L&D functions need to deliver business impact?”.

The reason I chose to go to you directly as practitioners is because I can’t think of anyone better to help shape these insights. I mean, we all are doing the work after all. I haven’t partnered with any companies for this. I compiled everything with a simple Google Form and worked with my LLM of choice (Claude) to unpack, contextualise and distill these insights for you.

As a bonus, I’ve asked a few trusted voices in our industry to take a look over the data and give their thoughts too.

You’ll find their analysis on the results across this article and on the summary landing page.

How to read this data

Every percentage in this report shows the share of respondents who named a skill.

I asked L&D professionals one open question: what skills do L&D functions need to deliver business impact?

I grouped their answers into 26 skills across six capability areas. Most people named several skills, so one answer can count towards more than one skill and more than one area.

That’s why the figures add up to more than 100%.

An area’s figure counts each person once, even if they named several skills within it.

The BIG 6 core capabilities

• Business + Strategy
• Consulting + Influence
• Design + Delivery
• Data + Evidence
• Human Skills
• Tech + AI

The TOP 10 Skills (26 in total)

1. Business literacy
2. Data literacy
3. Performance consulting
4. Stakeholder management
5. AI fluency
6. Storytelling
7. Measurement, evaluation & ROI
8. Strategic thinking & alignment
9. Influence & persuasion
10. Learning & experience design

Btw, find all 26 skill themes on the interactive landing page with more analysis and additional notes from leading CLOs.

The 5 most insightful things I learned about skills in L&D today

1. Business literacy was the most-named skill and maybe that tells us more about L&D’s future than you think. While our industry has traditionally relied on bedazzling stakeholders with the mysterious powers of their learning craft alone, I think AI is making us question that reliance. I only see this as a positive, as if you want to enable real performance you gotta understand how your business works.
   
   
2. L&D needs to work from evidence: 44% named data literacy or measurement and ROI. Data literacy alone is the second most-named skill, at 34%. It’s clear we have the best intentions to be better with data. But will we…and how will we do that at scale? 🤔
   
   
3. Learning experience design was not as popular as I expected. The data was clear with more business focused and human skills trumping learning design, which is weird, right? Considering we’re in L&D. This is not to say people aren’t prizing experience design as important, I think they’re just expanding the horizons of their capabilities as AI continues to devour everything like a chaotic Pac-Man on steroids.
   
   
4. AI matters, but it didn’t dominate. If you look at skill lists for most professions, the top usually goes something like “AI, AI, AI and AI”. What we discovered in this data is that AI fluency is important but practitioners are combining that with high value human skills.
   
   
5. Practitioners are ditching the order taker vibe. I found that at least 39% of respondents named a skill (or batch of skills) that focused on diagnosing the real performance problem before agreeing to design any solution. Again, feels like a good sign towards being a partner to the business rather than a participant to relentless course requests.

The 2024 vs 2027 L&D skills outlook

Back in 2024, I listed the 7 skills L&D teams needed as follows:

1. Marketing
2. Product management
3. Data analysis
4. Content curation + creation
5. Digital intelligence
6. Performance Consulting
7. Experience design

A lot has changed in that time (obvs).

Now we have new data from a good chunk of our profession in the latest survey to guide us.

While the data is good, that doesn’t mean it’s pointing us in all the right directions in where you focus your energy.

You (+ your teams) don’t need all 26 skills, and we shouldn’t read the data that way. I’ve spent the past few weeks thinking deeply about what the data tells us, what I see in the industry and the blind spots.

That has led me to the 10 skills I believe will serve every L&D operator well to focus on for at least the next 1 -2 years (don’t hold me to that, though).

This is built from 4 pillars:

• The survey data from 200 teams covered above
• What I see across the industry and in other industry skill reports
• My last analysis on this same topic back in 2024
• The gaps I see and think we need to bridge in order to move from being a function of production → enablement

The 10 essential skills for L&D Operators

Here’s the updated list for 2027 with notes on what’s new, what remained and what got cut.

Btw, these aren’t in any order of importance.

[NEW] Business Literacy

Claude insisted I call this “business and commercial acumen”, but I’m not a corpo bro, so I ain’t gonna do that. This was the number 1 chosen skill by practitioners but funny enough features very little on many BIG industry surveys.

At a glance this is:

• Knowing what your organisation builds (products/services etc)
• Understanding how your organisation makes and spends money
• Using the above two to speak the language of your organisation

I believe this is the basis of being able to make any real change to performance in the workplace.

I’ve been astounded by the number of teams I’ve met over the years who have little idea on what their business does and how it makes money. Safe to say, you’re not going to do much if you don’t invest here.

[Updated] Data Analysis + Measurement

The holy grail of L&D. If I could crack this, I’d probably be a trillionaire.

As you read in the “things I learned” section, we want to be evidence based but I just think we don’t know how. I’m a realist, they’ll never be ‘one model’ that works for all with measurement. It’s incredibly complex and is deeply influenced by where you work and the resources at your disposal.

AI, however, provides an opportunity to do more with our data.

None of us are data scientists or analysts, and we shouldn’t be. Access to data has never been our problem. Analysing, contextualising and taking action on that data has, and like I said, AI is very useful here.

The survey results shared in the first part of this edition are a great example of that. I fed them into Claude to uncover insights together, find patterns and interrogate assumptions (plus design all the visuals you see). That would have been a lot harder and a far longer process on my own.

[SAME] Performance Consulting

One of the deadliest weapons in your L&D arsenal, and for good reason.

Based on data from over 200 teams, we see this only sharpened with responses heavily weighted to stakeholder management and influencing, which all fall under the consulting umbrella. To be fair, the “Consulting and Influence” capability could just be called Performance Consulting.

Perhaps I will change that based on more feedback.

If you’re not familiar with performance consulting, check out the resources below:

• Why performance consulting is more important now than ever in L&D
• 8 killer performance consulting questions every L&D operator should ask
• The Art of Performance Consulting course

[NEW] Strategic Thinking

Since AI is eating up a lot of the executional layer, that means we as humans need to get better at the deep thinking layer.

I’m not McKinsey, so that’s the best title I have for that.

The “deep thinking” layer is probably what you think it means. Thinking deeply across a diverse and dispersed workplace. I couldn’t call this skill “deep thinking”, so I went with “Strategic Thinking”, which I know can sound ambiguous but let me give you a clear definition ↓

The components of this are in systems, first principles and product thinking, and lucky for you, I covered these with two other elite human thinking frameworks in a recent newsletter.

This skill, or set of skills, are vital to support change management and enablement.


I think there’s a nice connection between this one and a few other skills on our list. For instance, our prior skill of Performance Consulting asks why we’re doing the ‘thing. While Systems thinking asks how it fits and connects into the business. Product thinking asks whether it’s working and what’s next, and First Principles asks whether we are solving the real problem or just doing what we’ve always done.

All are about seeing the whole picture and its impact instead of the single task in front of you.

Resources:

• 4 elite human thinking frameworks
• How to apply first principles thinking in L&D
• How to be a systems thinker

[NEW] AI Fluency

I mean, are you surprised?

You knew this was going to be here.

It is a huge gap in the L&D operators skillset, and it’s probably for that reason it was not mentioned much in the survey data. Don’t sleep on this, friend. You need to craft this skill to both deliver impact and protect your career.

I’ve spoken at length about AI fluency for L&D before, and even shared the top courses to check out.

[SAME] Learning Experience Design

The totally obvious one.

What is workplace L&D without experience design? Yes, it looks a little different today but the fundamentals are largely the same.

I’m not the guy to talk to about good and even great learning experience design.

These people are:

• Nick Shackleton Jones
• Lauren Waldman
• Luke Hobson

And many more (drop your recommendations in the comments).

[UPDATED] Storytelling marketing

Yes, all those rumours are true.

Storytelling is one of the sexiest skills you can have at your disposal. Even the AI companies are looking for skilled storytellers. So that should tell you a lot.

We’re in the business of people, which means we must be able to connect with them and influence them through change.

That means you have to be a good storyteller.

People don’t change for no reason, and I’m a big believer that good stories entertain people, but great stories change people.

Marketing and sales are both forms of storytelling as they serve the purpose of telling the stories of your work, people and the results. What I’m not saying is you need to learn to be an expert marketer and salesman, but you’d be wise to understand a few techniques.

Our industry falls too often into the trap of build and they will come.

Sadly, they don’t.

You can have the most amazing learning experience in human existence, but if no one knows it exists, what it does and why it’s important for them ,  you’re pretty much digging your own grave.

You need the whole team to buy into this way of thinking because it’s something we each do every day, in many ways. You market/sell your skills to a potential employer, you market ideas to business leaders, and you even use marketing techniques to convince your crush to go on a date with you.

My guide to storytelling for business might be one for you to check out.

[SAME] Digital Intelligence

Outside of AI, you still need to know how the digital world works by being savvy in understanding the digital systems we work in.

A mistake I’ve seen made by too many practitioners is saying: “Tech is just not my thing”, but that’s wrong because it’s everyone’s thing in this world. I went deep on digital intelligence in a previous playbook you should probably check out 😉

[NEW] Human Instincts

This is the stuff that’s hard to categorise.

It’s a collection of micro skills, capabilities and behaviours that we often use. Judgement, context, curation, expertise and a unique point of view are what’s most valuable in a sea of AI-slop.

Crafting these instincts also forces you to ask deep and dark questions like: “What should I not do with AI?” As always, more on this in a previous exploration of what you need to stay sharp + human in an AI obsessed world.

[NEW] Workflow Design

This is where a lot of the gold is and is currently being underserved.

Knowing how to help teams deconstruct the things they do on repeat to build a workflow and then analyse that to see if it can be redefined with AI at the core or enabled by it with automation instead.

This requires deep levels of the skills we’ve talked about in AI fluency, human instincts, experience design and strategic thinking. Of course, you know I’ve covered tons on the ‘how’ of this too. So best check out my piece on moving L&D from production to enablement and why workflow design is an essential skill in this.

What changed and why we said goodbye

So, what’s been cut since 2024?

🔄 Marketing → Storytelling

I’ve been banging on about marketing for a decade, but I’ve come to realise I was always talking about storytelling, and that has also evolved as AI eats a lot of tasks that we know as classic ‘marketing’ tasks.

Marketing is not dead, it just pays to be a great storyteller which I like to think marketing is.

🔄 Product management → Product thinking

I’m not really sure this should have ever been standalone in previous editions, but I was looking at it from a technology management perspective, whereas now I see it as a way of thinking about how “this tech” works, and if not, what’s next.

Hence why this has evolved to product thinking and bundled under Strategic thinking.

You can disagree with me, of course.

❌ Content creation and curation

Look, let’s be brutally honest.

If your whole strategy is around “building content only” as a team, you’re in a race to the bottom and that model is on fire as we speak.

We see this in the data from 200 teams and my views mirror that. I even had many survey comments declaring that content creation and curation has effectively died in their teams.

You already know why that is.

My experiences with Claude design have made me question the creation of assets as they are in L&D today. I do think curation has a place, and a very important one at that, but that feels better placed under strategic thinking now.

Final Thoughts (+shareable assets)

That’s it for now, folks.

To take a look through all the visuals from the findings and access the skills wheel, jump over to my State of L&D Skills summary page.

Please tag me in wherever you share these insights, and of course, share your thoughts with me too.

Before you go… 👋

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