Companies are pouring billions into learning and development (L&D) to build talent and stay competitive. According to The Josh Bersin Company, they’re spending more than $340 billion annually on employee training and development.
Yet, as the world of work shifts rapidly with AI and new technologies, 95% of executives admit they don’t think they’re investing enough to keep skills relevant.
And here’s the kicker: employees aren’t seeing results. Hungry for growth, only 12% feel confident they can apply what they’ve learned to their job. It’s no surprise that 51% of executives say their L&D investment is a “waste of time.”
So with all this money and urgency — why isn’t L&D working?
Many learning solutions aren’t designed to build real skills.
Access to content doesn’t automatically result in skills acquisition. While L&D often deploys a variety of learning solutions across the organization, many overindex on the content rather than the format or the quality of instruction and experience. Content libraries and learning experience platforms are popular options designed to give employees choice and ease, but they often sacrifice depth for breadth. When was the last time you heard of someone who watched a video and got a promotion or moved into a new role entirely?
The volume of learning can be as overwhelming as it is ineffective. As Keith Meyerson, Director of Talent Management at POWDR, put it on The Strategic L&D Podcast, "It’s not a field of dreams. If you build it, they’re not coming. If you provide 10,000 learning objects in an LMS, the reaction we’ve heard is, ‘I don’t even know where to begin.’”
Real learning happens through quality experiences, interaction, and application of the skills learned. Workers need more than awareness and cursory understanding in order to master a new skill that can enable them to move into a new role, and they need a clear pathway to that role — not an endless sea of content.
L&D is missing an opportunity to align more closely with business goals and metrics.
L&D is meant to help develop talent, promote a culture of learning, and build skills to support organizational priorities, but 60% of companies don’t see alignment between business goals and learning strategy. As AI upends traditional ways of working and companies look to reskill and redeploy employees into future-ready roles, that alignment is only becoming more important.
L&D needs to be more in tune with the business than ever before, but leaders often don’t have the data or insight to know which skills can support the organization. L&D leaders are often tracking learning success by metrics such as usage and NPS scores, rather than productivity, roles filled, internal mobility rates, or job changes. Currently, only 23% of companies integrate business data with HR data — a missed opportunity for making learning a strategic tool that responds directly to company needs.
What would close the gap between investment and L&D in business impact?
New solutions that feature credentialed, high-quality learning are paving a clearer path to skill-building at scale. Innovative learning offerings that are built with skills in mind are showing promise in driving real mobility outcomes, as are programs that are co-designed with business stakeholders.
Guild, a comprehensive education and skilling solution for building talent, focuses on partnering with forward-thinking learning providers whose programs consistently help working adults stay on track, grow their skills, and advance their careers. Across all program categories, first-year academic persistence rates are 3.5 percentage points higher than the national average for Guild’s Learning Marketplace, and 13 percentage points higher when considering the additional program curation and support services provided to Guild learners.1
Some organizations have also seen success with what The Josh Bersin Company calls capability academies: role-specific, scalable learning programs that feature company context and cohorts of employees. These custom learning solutions are co-designed and co-created by internal subject matter experts, business leaders, L&D leaders, and external partners.
Innovative team structures that tap into the right insights can turn talent potential into real results, tying investment directly to impact. For example, Bon Secours Mercy Health built an internal mobility team that uses learning progression data to help inform outreach to individuals that might be well suited for new (and in-demand) roles.
The path to a future-ready workforce becomes clear when L&D fulfills its potential.
Investment in L&D only pays off when it’s tied to real outcomes. By focusing on alignment with business goals, high-quality skill-building experiences, and leveraging data for talent mobility, L&D can fulfill its potential in supporting workforce transformation. For organizations willing to break from tradition, the path forward is wide open — and it leads to a workforce that’s skilled, motivated, and ready to meet the future head-on.
