Four key trends for L&D in 2025

As we step into 2025, the landscape of learning and development is undergoing a radical transformation. With AI at the forefront and the imperative for continuous upskilling and reskilling now a top priority, L&D professionals face both challenges and opportunities. 

Pair this with the expectations on L&D functions to be a strategic partner in key organisational decisions and there’s a lot to digest. In fact, almost 60% of learning professionals say that L&D has a seat at the executive table. While this is a huge step forward, it means that they have even more priorities to juggle.

Let’s not dive in without a mention of a trend that never goes away (nor should it) in the world of learning and development: people.

Your employees should be woven into every aspect of your planning and decision making. The impact your L&D initiatives have on your learners and how they can use your learning platforms to develop themselves personally and professionally must be front and centre when considering every trend. 

So – with that being said, let’s look at four key corporate learning trends for 2025. 

Governance, Risk and Compliance Training remains a non-negotiable for all organisations, no matter the size or industry – which is why it’s critical that organisations consider it a top priority. With regulatory updates and changes happening at a pace that can be difficult to keep up with, it often feels like organisations are on the back foot. Luckily, systems and technology can help make compliance far easier to keep a handle on. 

However, compliance often carries a negative connotation – perceived as a dry, mandatory exercise. This can hinder engagement and make it difficult to motivate employees. To overcome this, organisations must strive to make compliance training exciting and engaging.

How to rethink compliance in 2025:

• Personalise Learning: Tailor training to specific roles and industries to ensure relevance -  borrow a tactic from Marketing and make sure the learner can see the relevance to the training for success in their job role.
• Offer Compelling Content: Use real-world examples, storytelling, and interactive elements to make training engaging and memorable - Illustrate why compliance matters with real human stories. If learners can see and feel the human cost of being non-compliant, they’re more likely to modify their behaviour – for good.  
• Utilise Microlearning & multimedia: Break down complex topics into smaller, easily digestible modules to optimise learning and use multimedia approaches to stimulate different senses aiding engagement and memory.

Keeping up with compliance is a constant requirement, so it’s vital that L&D focus not only on providing the right type of training, but also on making it exciting and showcasing why it’s so important to get right.  

There’s no end of research that showcases the value upskilling and reskilling has from both an organisational perspective alongside nurturing the personal development of individuals. To remain competitive, organisations must continuously invest in employee learning and development across the employee lifecycle. And with good reason – continuous skills development can underpin many organisational goals:

• Future-proofing the workforce: Preparing employees for the future by developing in-demand skills. 
• Attracting and retaining top talent: Providing clear career paths and opportunities for skill development. 
• Improving organisational agility: Enabling employees to adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities.

How to prioritise upskilling and reskilling in 2025:

• Provide targeted training: It may seem obvious but not everyone considering their people and the specific roles they carry out when they are looking at assigning training. Personalised learning paths will ensure everyone has access to training that matters to them.
• Think about skills gaps: Look at your organisation as a whole and find out where people could fit in other teams with different disciplines and skillsets – internal movement and promotions can be the key to successful workforce.
• Utilise an upskilling strategy: An upskilling strategy will help to roll out upskilling and reskilling as an initiative across your organisation. 

To keep your workforce skilled and flexible, you must prioritise their upskilling and reskilling, recognising its value for both the organisation and the individual.

Employee engagement is critical for successful learning and development. While L&D departments may invest in high-quality training content, it's crucial to ensure employees are willing and able to engage with it. Without employee engagement, even the best training programs will fail to deliver the desired return on investment. This is where L&D needs to create a top-down approach to learning.

How to drive engagement in 2025:

• Meet employee expectations: Today's employees expect high-quality, user-friendly learning experiences similar to what they encounter in their personal lives. This necessitates a shift towards more engaging and personalised learning solutions.
• Create accessible content: Making learning accessible across all devices, particularly mobile, is crucial for reaching a wider audience and accommodating diverse learning styles.
• Leveraging expertise: Featuring renowned industry experts can help with the creation of engaging content that comes from real people. 
•  Ensuring credible content: Obtaining relevant accreditations such as CPD can enhance the reputation of your L&D programs, as well as ensuring its accuracy. 

By showcasing learning as an investment in employee growth and a core component of the company culture, L&D can create a more engaged learning environment and prove its value across the employee lifecycle.

Artificial intelligence is certainly not a new corporate learning trend (in fact, we've talked about it in our previous trends blog) but with its scope and potential continuing to grow, it's now more important than ever to embrace AI and work with it in the L&D space. 

While expectations of AI’s contribution to learning are high, its adoption doesn’t currently match the hype. This needs to change in 2025 - and it can only be rolled out successfully with the help of L&D professionals paving the way. L&D need to equip themselves with the knowledge to use AI to unlock their people’s potential, helping their workforce – and L&D themselves – do the best work of their lives.

How to leverage AI in 2025:

• Don’t be afraid of its potential: You only get out as much as you put in, so by providing your learners with the right AI training to help them get the answers they need, you will reap the rewards and create a thriving workforce.
• Measure what matters: For compliance, tracking and recording is key. By utilising AI for this process, you can remove some heavy administrative burden. 
• Strengthen onboarding: Using an AI assistant which can locate and share relevant training documents immediately means you can cut through a lot of noise and get a new starter up to speed far quicker. 

The opportunity to support the workforce through AI is huge. AI can’t replace people – but it can help actualise people’s potential.

To get the most out of your L&D initiatives in 2025, you should consider how to use these current trends in learning and development to your advantage, but it also requires the right technology and tools to master compliance, prioritise upskilling, drive engagement and leverage AI successfully.

By utilising solutions like a robust Learning Management System and a professional development platform, you can empower your workforce to digest engaging content, track completion rates and help to create a culture of learning. This is particularly key for compliance learning: By utilising an LMS that tracks learner’s progress and knowledge against regulations, organisations can ensure their workforce remains compliant, while also being far simpler to demonstrate to auditors if needed.

As previously discussed, you need to also keep people at the heart of the learning experience. When you consider how your workforce wants to learn and provide seamless solutions which enable this, you can spark a joy for learning that goes beyond a tick-box exercise.

Find out how our digital learning solutions can shape your employee experience and ensure your organisation is fully prepared for the future of L&D.