Learning & Development predictions for 2025

As the haze of Christmas and the New Year celebrations fades into the dyspepsia of January and the credit card bills of tightened belts, it’s time for another round of predictions for Learning and Development in 2025.

In 2024, I predicted a focus on AI (not exactly a surprise to anyone) but with a hope that L&D teams would re-think what they do in the light of the availability of co-pilots for all our teams. However, the cascade of AI-generated digital content still takes centre stage. I can only hope my prediction that we will move beyond the quick fix and into something which generates real value for us and for those with whom we work, will be realised in 2025.

I also talked about Impact – and here I think the green shoots of change have begun to emerge. I read more and more of people looking to effect meaningful and long-lasting change as an outcome of their endeavours. I also see less and less focus on counting the number of consumers of content or post-course NPS scores as though they might mean anything in terms of lasting impact. Not there yet, but hopeful signs.

I also predicted that communication skills will move front and centre. Again, some hopeful signs there, as people recognise that collaboration, team working and effective interactions between peers, team members and their leaders and with partners, users and customers is massively important. Workplaces can be much more productive through a more evidence-based approach to developing core communication capabilities.

Buoyed by at least some partial success in interpreting the L&D zeitgeist twelve months ago, what might happen in 2025?

1. The end of Soft Skills

I should be clear. I don’t mean that we shouldn’t continue to concentrate on those interpersonal skills that are commonly clustered together under this heading. I mean we should stop referring to them as ‘soft’. These skills are hard. They can also be improved and there is significant evidence of what we mean by improved.

We can measure how well some people communicate, listen, handle conflict, are creative and work constructively with others. We can also derive, from observing those who interact with others effectively, a series of behaviours that are statistically significant contributors to being a good colleague/leader/team member and customer service provider.

When we discuss these attributes of our more effective colleagues as ‘soft’, we don’t just undervalue them. We also provide an excuse for those who peddle psycho-babble. ‘Soft skills’ is frequently the cover for fluffy thinking.

Anyone who tells you they can’t possible monitor or measure success in these areas is talking hogwash. Earlier this year, I was privileged to introduce Kerri O’Neill and Ghassan Karian of Ipsos UK and Ipsos Karian Box as keynote speakers at the World of Learning Conference in Birmingham. Their research into what drives employee engagement and the impact of high levels of employee engagement was robust, thorough and genuinely eye-opening.

Guess what? A focus on improving communications, collaboration, team working and evidence-based leadership behaviours associated with those areas, works. It not only improves employee engagement but that engagement is strongly correlated with higher performance, less absence and shared commitment to organisational purpose.

I hope as an industry we can focus more on positive, proven behaviours that enhance the work environment in 2025. I hope we stop giving charlatans air time as we demand more evidence to support the hard process of changing behaviour.

2. Learning Transfer

As a codicil to my 2024 predictions about AI and Impact, I think this year will also be the year in which learning transfer or the application of new skills and behaviours in the workplace, takes a more prominent role. It will be seen through how we design learning interventions and how we engage with those we serve.

In the past, the focus has been on what people know accompanied with a devout hope that this might result in changed practice in work. Crossing our fingers and promising to be good is all very well, but it doesn’t amount to a strategy for change.

As upskilling and reskilling overtakes compliance training in L&D’s areas of primary concern (see here for Fosway’s illuminating research on this), L&D teams need to be much more focused on how we will see skills improve where it matters. I have repeatedly banged on about the fact that our job as L&D professionals is ‘to enable people to do things differently and do different things’. I first expressed that in my 2013 book, Complete Training. I take no pleasure in the fact that when I say this to audiences of L&D people now – 12 years on – it is still received as a revelation. It is why we’re here, folks!

What do I hope to see in practice?

• Design for implementation. Have we included in our learning journey design and in the programmes and initiatives we develop a clear path for how our colleagues and clients will do things differently? Have we created resources, support tools and check ins to enable them to not only try things out, but to gain feedback and practical support when its much easier to revert to the known and the tried and tested? Have we created the environment within teams, and above teams, to facilitate experimentation, continued learning on the job and meaningful reflection?
• Manager engagement. Too often, despite efforts to the contrary, the tacit – and occasionally explicit – response people get when they come back to the day job is ‘let’s just do things the way we always did/the way I tell you – forget what the L&D people say, you’re back in the real word now.”
  That kind of response from leaders and influential peers ought to be unacceptable, but is frequently demonstrated without comment. Yes, people roll their eyes. Yes, they may be a bit annoyed. But often, this frustration is accompanied by ‘but what can you do?’ Its time to work that out in advance, and to call managers and influential individuals to account when they undermine the organisation’s investment in skills and change.

• A real learning culture. As a starting point, lets stop trying to describe people logging on to our Learning Experience platform or On Demand library as evidence of a ‘learning culture’. The real acid test will be for leaders and managers to demonstrate – and be held accountable for – how they have enabled and facilitated individuals to change what they do and how they behave in the workplace.

3. A focus on ‘How’

From learning objectives to pre-programme publicity, many learning initiatives are described, in great detail, about what they will enable people to do. The problem is, most of the content is precisely about the ‘what’ and infrequently about the ‘how’. Telling people what they should do – and backing that up with evidence about why it is important to carry out these tasks – matters, but it is not the whole story.

Without detail of ‘how’ this is to be achieved, the steps to competence and what good looks like, our colleagues who participate in these programmes are often left in a wilderness. They know what they ought to be doing. They may also know which of their previous practices are no longer appropriate. But without the ‘how’ they simply don’t have the tools and step by step guides to change. Their confidence in the old way of doing things has been undermined and the scaffolding supporting the adoption of new practices is rickety at best.

When we talk about facilitating experimentation and change by creating an environment which is psychologically safe, the platforms on which we ask our people to stand should be solid. This means – in part – providing the tools, the time and the clarity to incrementally try new things and reflect on how, and how well, something worked. It is about providing feedback. It is about being alongside people as they try to do new things or to do the old things better.

To care about our people, to care about what they do, is about being clear about how they should carry out their roles and about how they will be supported. It is not fixed. New possibilities may emerge. New ways of doing things will come to the surface. By creating a vocabulary based on how we create the environment in which these practices spread. In a workplace where people constantly ask ‘How?’, high performance becomes viral.

Those are my three predictions for 2025.

They may be more hopes for the future and our continued relevance.

They may represent a series of expectations which will be dashed come December.

But I start 2025 full of optimism and I hope you do too. Happy New Year.

This article was originally published on Training Zone.