Let’s be honest, we get a lot of stick in the L&D industry.
Senior execs query what we do and how we provide value almost weekly. CFOs are chomping at the bit to cut our budgets in half, and middle managers think we’re just delivering ‘nice to have and fun experiences’ and believe they can do it better for their teams.
Who knows, maybe they’re right?
90% of the time, I believe they’re wrong.
That’s not to say I think they’re liars or anything. I just think they’re misinformed and aren’t clear on how their local L&D team is delivering value.
The problem is we’re not so great at defining the value we bring to organisations.
If we want the narrative and perceptions to change, we need to be clear and compelling on how we deliver value every year. I understand this is a ‘captain obvious’ statement to make.
So, I thought, why not ask the talented 4,500 readers of my newsletter about the areas they’re focusing on in 2025 to drive value for their organisation.
The killer question, data collection and analysis
Since November 24, I’ve run a one-question survey through the newsletter.
It’s closed as of last week. The only question I asked was “What areas do you think L&D teams should focus on to drive value in 2025, and why?”
I’ve had thousands of responses.
Analysing this was no easy task, as you can imagine. I’ve read a lot of the comments, but I can’t read them all. So, as you might have guessed, I turned to AI for some help. Data analysis is a great use case for AI collaboration, imo.
Over a course of a week, I’ve analysed, thought deeply and categorised thousands of comments into key themes.
I’m sharing the top 3 key themes that emerged with you today, along with my thoughts and valuable comments from respondents.
These are what I look at as 3 ways L&D teams plan to deliver value for businesses in 2025.
As always, context is everything. Our industry is huge, and while I have a few thousand responses as part of this survey, it won’t represent everyone’s specific culture, context and constraints.
Take these results as a pulse of what fellow pros are doing to drive value, and perhaps, let it be a source of inspiration for you to get clear on how you’re delivering value to your business this year.
The Top 3 Focus Areas for L&D in 2025
1. Leverage and humanise AI for work
Generative AI is being touted as a transformative opportunity for L&D and education, particularly in realising the ultimate dream of true personalised learning.
You knew that already, but just in case.
What warmed my little black heart about the comments on AI, was how few mentioned using it for more content. I like to think my constant parading about just using AI to create more (and often sub-par) content, which delivers little value is rubbing off on you. But, I also know you’re a smart cookie, so you have more wisdom than most in the industry.
If creating more content wasn’t on the mind, what was?
I’m happy to say the majority of comments focused on people learning how to use AI intelligently themselves and supporting their workforce to do that. Plus, I discovered repeat mentions of humanising AI for work, which feels incredibly valuable.
As one respondent shared: “I’m focused on enabling the use of AI and learning where it’s relevant rather than just being a buzz word. Conversations with senior IT stakeholders to get it moving. Present business cases. Address the barriers. Get the business to commit. Help people to learn where it benefits.”
Another highlighted the smart move to support humans to hone their craft with human skills alongside expanding capabilities with AI, or as they shared: “In a world where possibilities are endless, L&D should focus on prioritising humans alongside AI.”
In sum: What came through was a strong theme that a large portion of you are focused on not just how to leverage these tools for work, but helping the human find their place too.
2. Building the right skills for the modern world
One thing I never find helpful with the usual industry drool of “x priorities for this year” is the lack of specificity.
For example, many will list ‘Upskilling and Reskilling’ as a priority, but list nothing of what skills or why. I want to avoid this in my own insights from the survey comments. So, we’re going to be specific.
As you can imagine, skills or something skill-based related was mentioned A LOT.
We’ll focus on exactly what skills were mentioned in a moment, but what I can say is the overall theme of these comments focused on helping people build the right skills to navigate the modern world, not more skills.
There was a strong sense in responses that too much time is wasted on skills that are dictated by misinformed leadership and offer little real-world impact.
Again, probably from my influence of mentioning it every other week, many responses highlighted digital skills as a priority: “Digital skills – we’re at a time where we have vast differences in basic digital skills and those gaps only seem to be getting wider.”
Of course, AI literacy was mentioned several times as a priority skill, and we shouldn’t be surprised by this.
Another two skills that crept up many times were both effective communication (heavy on the effective) and the family of metacognitive skills with critical thinking and problem solving. I can’t help but think these are being driven by what teams are seeing on the ground with behaviour change with AI tools.
As one respondent superbly put it with communication:
“In a world full of uncertainty and ambiguity our brains are desperate to find some clarity. With the rise of social media and ever shorter modes of communication (reels, tik tok), most of us are less and less able to communicate well, or distil our thoughts into comprehensive structures that can easily be explained to others. Shorter attention spans mean we also don’t listen (active listening) as well as we used to. I’ve received a lot of “apparently” different requests for learning projects/interventions. When I try to dissect what the underlying theme is, it almost always boils down to how well people communicate – whether it’s about a line manager role, commercial role, senior leadership role, technical role. Not to mention that those who are effective communicators are also the ones who benefit most from AI – those who prompt the best are essentially communicating clearly with their AI tool of choice.”
Such a wonderful insight.
And another great note from this respondent on developing those human skills: “We’re focusing on meta cognition – helping them understand how they think, being able to problem solve by recognising what they don’t know so they can fill in the gaps. Practicing curiosity and thinking creatively – by creatively I mean the ability to problem solve.”
If we’re to sum up these priority skills, it looks a little like this:
- Digital skills
- AI literacy
- Human skills – thinking, communicating, problem-solving etc
A pretty strong focus, imo.
3. Aligning Learning with Business Impact
This theme should surprise no one.
It occupies many of the ‘top x priority lists’ of industry lists for as long as I’ve been in the industry. So, it seems we’re still not getting it right!
On the surface, the message here is simple: Do things that benefit your business and you’ll create value.
Of course, it’s more complicated than that (isn’t it always).
I received the most comments on this theme, so I can see the passion that burns through so many of you when it comes to this. I found this theme was multi-layered with comments on showing impact, how L&D is integrated across a business and how we define significant challenges rather than taking one leaders word for it.
One respondent put it best as they shared:
“Starting with the problem to solve and really understanding it before jumping in with solutions! There are so many examples, from standard ‘mandatory’ training, to inspirational webinars to use of AI. We need to take a HUGE step back, pause and look at what the needs really are and how best to solve them. It’s so easy to get lost in all the day-to-day ‘to dos’ but we can be so much more efficient with a little better understanding of context / problem.”
Another recommended to align with the business, you must know it well, and I couldn’t agree more: “The focus should be whatever is the top business challenge facing their organisation. This requires them to actually go learn the business of their business.“
One of my first rules of L&D onboarding is always to know how your company makes money, otherwise, you can’t really impact performance.
This comment on L&D’s organisational alignment as a means of impacting the business got me thinking too: “L&D should be integrated into the business strategy, not function as a standalone entity.”
I don’t know many companies that consider L&D as a strategic imperative. Not the function in the business itself, anyway. Almost all leaders I meet with are clear on the benefits of improved learning and performance, yet they don’t see that coming from one department like L&D. Instead, they see it as a somewhat shared focus across every team.
While that’s lovely to think of, I always believe you need some kind of sherpa to lead the way.
Standout comments
Obviously, I can’t share every single comment.
Here’s a few more I didn’t include above, but certainly provoked deep thinking while writing this analysis:
- In a world where possibilities have multiplied thanks to AI, it has become harder to say, “We’ll do this one thing and get it right.” There’s always a temptation to experiment, to test thousands of new tools. However, sometimes the “right” approach is to focus on that one “apple pie made with grandma’s recipe” and execute it properly—respectfully, with consideration for humans, listening to them, and understanding their development concerns.
- Being able to measure the impact L&D has in the workplace and highlight is impact to show the value. Do not be an order taker- ask what is the problem the business is trying to solve? It may not be learning 🙂
- Address significant business problems! I often see learning getting excited by the novelty of certain solutions and losing touch with the value release / relevance of their products
- Develop solutions to help these employees achieve their objectives, as much as possible away from training and towards whatever the most effective solution can be (software, automation, repositories, aides, etc).
- Behaviour/ performance improvement. Why? Because if there is no improvement, then the learning is nothing more than information provided.
Final thoughts
There you have it, my fellow learning nerd.
Some food for thought from our community. While there is never only ‘one way’, I hope this gives you a view of what the industry is thinking and even inspires how you’re driving value across your business this year.
Before you go… 👋
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