Beth Knight |
Learning-and-development (L&D) has long been a critical function for nurturing talent and supporting organizational priorities.
Yet, as businesses confront seismic shifts in the workplace driven by technology, automation, and evolving employee expectations, 60% of companies report that their L&D strategies fail to align with overarching business goals. The consequence? Missed opportunities to fill skill gaps and unlock the full potential of workforce transformation.
In 2025 and beyond, aligning L&D with business objectives will no longer be optional. It will be essential for staying competitive and future-proofing the talent pipelines organizations need to adapt and grow. This requires an agile new approach to L&D that rethinks traditional metrics, adopts innovative approaches to skill-building, and harnesses data to create more precise and impactful learning strategies. From our research and experience, three approaches present themselves.
1. Measure outcomes that matter most to the business.
A fundamental challenge for many organizations lies in how they measure the success of their L&D programs. Leaders often rely on metrics such as usage rates or Net Promoter Scores (NPS) to measure success, and understandably so. These metrics are easy to pull and provide a useful snapshot of engagement and interest. While they will remain an important part of measuring the return on investment (ROI) of learning investments, they aren’t enough to show the demonstrable impact of L&D to the business and keep pace with a world that’s changing exponentially.
Consider that 39% of core skills are expected to change in the next five years, according to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report. That means a lot of workforce transformation. L&D isn’t going to be able to keep up with that pace of change by measuring engagement metrics.
If L&D is to fulfill its potential as a strategic skilling tool that powers workforce transformation, it needs to be able to understand and prove the deeper outcomes that matter most: productivity gains, roles filled, internal mobility rates, and job changes. These metrics may not be easy to measure and explain easily to C-suite leaders, and often depend on cross-functional partnerships. But they’re essential to understanding the true impact of skilling initiatives on the business.
2. Experiment with new and innovative approaches to skilling.
Some organizations are looking beyond traditional learning solutions to find different avenues for skilling, including new approaches to partnership with learning providers.
For example, retail employers in need of talent pipelines for frontline managers partnered with Guild and its network of vetted learning providers to find a solution. Guild, for its part, consulted with the University of Denver to create a new short-form offering designed to build the skills needed to fill the role. Guild and the University of Denver continued to optimize the program for engagement over time, and in the spring of 2024, hit a 70% completion rate with 100% of students surveyed reporting they’d gained new skills — and would recommend the program to a friend. This was a L&D solution directly aligned to the needs of the business, and it has reaped myriad benefits for organizations and their learners.
Another promising solution is the adoption of “capability academies,” as coined by The Josh Bersin Company. These role-specific, scalable learning programs are designed with input from subject matter experts, business leaders, and external partners, ensuring alignment with company priorities.
Capability academies focus on co-creating tailored experiences that enable employees to master new skills while building team cohesion. This approach represents a shift from broad, one-size-fits-all learning platforms to targeted, context-rich programs centered around group discussions and activities that drive engagement, improve coordination, and foster interpersonal connections. This helps employees apply their learning directly to real-world scenarios, building organizational capabilities unique to the business context.
3. Harness a data-driven approach to stay both agile and precise.
Only 23% of companies currently integrate HR data with business data — a significant hurdle to making learning a strategic tool that directly addresses organizational needs.
Some organizations, however, have cracked the code. In healthcare, the need for specific roles is particularly acute. One health system found that it was losing tenured nurses at an alarming rate and decided to take a look at enrollment data for its education benefit to see how they could better serve this highly valuable employee group. In analyzing that data, they identified a gap in programming that could better engage and retain experienced nurses. HR leaders opted to fully fund 13 MSN programs ranging from healthcare policy to nursing informatics, population health, leadership, and more.
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, innovative 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.
