2024
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L&D powers the AI future
The AI era is here, and leaders across learning and talent development have a new mandate: help people and organizations rise to opportunity with speed and impact.
As AI reshapes how people learn, work, and chart their careers, L&D sits at the center of organizational agility, delivering business innovation and critical skills.This report combines survey results, LinkedIn behavioral data, and wisdom from L&D pros around the globe to help you rewrite your playbook for the future of work.
Read on for data, advice, and bold ideas.
2. Skills agility ↓
Chapter 1
Career development joins business impact as a critical focus area.
In a world awake to AI’s impact, skill building is no longer simply a perk for employees — it’s a priority for organizational success. So it’s no surprise that aligning learning to business goals is L&D’s top focus area for the second year in a row.
At the same time, a new priority demands attention. In a single year, helping employees develop their careers climbed from No. 9 on L&D’s priority list to No. 4.
This year’s research will take a deeper look at how career development drives business impact.
Show all top 10 focus areas
Show all top 10 focus areas
Additional L&D focus areas for 2024
6. Supporting employees through organizational change
7.Improving learner engagement
8.Measuring the success of learning programs
9.Ensuring diversity, equity, and inclusion
10.Promoting employee well-being
AI skills and career development fuel success.
Moving forward, organizations will succeed by embracing growth as a virtuous cycle. Employee growth, through learning and career development, spurs company growth. Likewise, company growth, through business innovation, energizes people to stay and grow even more.
Three points tell the story:
•People crave AI skills.
•They’re motivated by career progress.
•Companies must embrace both AI skills and career development to energize and retain talent.
Global perspectives on AI
“As a talent leader, your impact can define tomorrow’s success. Will you simply adapt, or will you lead your organization into the future?”
Dr. Terri Horton Work Futurist & Global Advisor at FuturePath, LLCGlobal perspectives on AI
“In the age of AI, senior leaders must create more room at the executive table to align talent strategy and business strategy — it’s not something you can simply hand off to HR.”
Jennifer Shappley VP, Talent at LinkedInGlobal perspectives on AI
“The greatest things in history have come from disruption. I am excited to see how AI will challenge us to be more strategic, more creative, and more innovative.”
Naphtali Bryant Chief People & Culture Officer at Lucas Museum of Narrative ArtGlobal perspectives on AI
“If a company invests in learning today, they will have more engaged and impactful employees ready to tackle tomorrow’s challenges.”
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Sara Dionne VP, Learning & Development (CLO) at ComcastGlobal perspectives on AI
“AI will change the skills needed to do the jobs of the future. It’s up to us to create an environment of curiosity and inspire employees to operate with agility and a growth mindset.”
Ekpedeme “Pamay” Bassey Chief Learning and Diversity Officer at Kraft HeinzGlobal perspectives on AI
“AI will be a paradigm shift for the world of work by both democratizing and individualizing learning and reaffirming employee growth as the ultimate goal.”
Guillaume Delacour Global Head of People Development at ABB
The C-suite wants to talk.
The door to the C-suite keeps opening wider. Learning is critical in the age of AI, and L&D is well-positioned to lead important conversations about business impact.
Likewise, company leaders are aware that learning is a worthy investment. According to the LinkedIn Executive Confidence Index, in the next 6 months, 9 out of 10 global executives plan to either increase or keep steady their investment in L&D, including upskilling and reskilling.
The business case for learning is clear.
When it’s time to meet with executives, L&D pros can cite new LinkedIn research that demonstrates how learning drives desirable business outcomes. This analysis uses LinkedIn platform data to score companies on alearning culture indexbased on:
•Size of L&D team
• Rate of employee skill development
• Volume of learning-related posts on the LinkedIn platform
It then assesses the companies’ performance on critical talent metrics. The findings are striking. Companies with strong learning cultures see higher rates of retention, more internal mobility, and a healthier management pipeline compared to those with smaller levels of commitment.
Learning amplifies connection and purpose.
Another talking point: learning is a secret sauce for camaraderie and meaning. As organizations continue to grapple with how best to engage dispersed and diverse teams, learning enhances people’s sense of connection and significance in their work.
In short, organizations that invest in learning will reap the reward of having people who are more invested in their organization’s success.
Chapter 2
Skills agility
To thrive in the AI era, companies must empower everyone to grow.
Tomorrow’s success requires skills agility — harnessing the right skills at the right time for the right work.
To unlock skills agility for their organizations, L&D pros must first let go of time-consuming tasks of the past — like laboring over custom content and lengthy training sessions. AI holds great promise for personalization, allowing more individuals to chart their professional destinies.
Likewise, career development and internal mobility programs that align individual aspirations with organizational business priorities represent the path to accelerated progress.
Let’s look at what’s helping organizations build nimble and adaptable skills at scale.
Large-scale upskilling programs continue to lag.
Before we examine what’s accelerating skills agility, let’s look at what’s not adding speed. For the third year in a row, most weighty initiatives (expensive, one-size-fits-all programs that aim to reskill hundreds or thousands of employees at once) are still at the planning and activation stages. Each year, fewer than 5% have advanced far enough to measure success.
TheHarvard Business Reviewsums it up well: “Among [companies] that have embraced the reskilling challenge, only a handful have done so effectively, and even their efforts have been subscale and of limited impact.”
Career goals add speed to skill building.
Increasingly, the best approach to skill building looks to be dynamic, efficient, and tailored to individual career motivations. It’s no wonder career development popped as a rising priority at the top of this report.
And when individual career development aligns with a company’s priorities, people and organizations build the critical, future-facing skills to navigate constant change.
Each employee has their own aspirations, experiences, and strengths. AI will enable more and more learners to tailor their learning and shape their careers.”
Shruti Bharadwaj Head, Talent, Learning & Culture at Airtel
The right support spurs individual progress.
This year’s research delves into the state of career development across the globe, finding that about 40% of organizations have mature career development initiatives — meaning they invest in career programs thatyield positive business results.
Companies in this category prioritize learning (68% have online learning programs). They also offer programs that put individuals’ career goals front and center (leadership development, shared internal jobs, mentorship, individual career plans, and mobility).
Gen Z wants to grow, even more than other generations.
By nature, younger workers start in entry-level jobs and are the hungriest for advancement. Companies that want to attract and engage Gen Z, the rising cohort of workers born after 1996, are wise to tap into the generation’s passion for progress. If there’s any doubt about whether Gen Z wants to learn and grow, the numbers add clarity.
What works well for Gen Z works well for everyone. Employees all want to see how learning translates to something that matters to them.”
Christopher Lind VP, Chief Learning Officer at ChenMed
Coaching is popular. AI can expand its scale.
Empowering people to build skills for career progress starts with a simple piece of advice: your future belongs to you.
Re-enter AI. In the years ahead, AI will become more common as a coach, advisor, or problem-solving assistant. While AI-powered coaching is not the only resource companies can tap into, it could be the answer to a problem that’s dogged L&D pros — how to provide personalized career development at scale.
Internal mobility is a growing spark — that requires fuel.
Most learning leaders see the rising potential of internal mobility. Companies that encourage employees to explore and stretch into different internal roles reap higher retention rates, a more agile pool of workforce skills, and employees with deeper cross-functional knowledge.
But many companies are still at the starting line, seeking the right cultural shifts to help employees overcome common barriers, such as bias in favor of external hiring and managers who hoard talent.
One tip: don’t get bogged down trying to build the perfect internal mobility program. Brainstorm small steps your organization can take today.
Mobility takes a village and merits a dedicated leader.
Because internal mobility is a newer goal for many, the question of where it sits in an organization’s structure can be muddy. Does talent acquisition lead these efforts, or L&D, or another group?
Two things are clear:
Shared leadership is common. For more than a third of organizations, internal mobility is shared between two or more roles and often includes the head of HR.
Ownership frequently sits at the top of human resources. In almost half (48%) of organizations, the head of HR owns or co-owns responsibility for leading mobility.
L&D can seize the day and lead the way.
Let’s revisit two of the focus areas at the top of the report. For organizations looking to align learning with business goals and help employees develop their careers, internal mobility stands out as an effective solution.
L&D can help people and businesses assess where skills are needed. Then they can equip people to move to new roles where their skills can grow and develop in sync with business needs — the very definition of skills agility.
L&D pros must help employees prioritize three things: skills for the job they do now; skills for the job they want tomorrow; and skills that will serve them for life.”
Geraldine Murphy Global Learning Experience Manager at The Heineken Company
Chapter 3
Impactful tactics — and bold ideas — inspire a brighter future.
While learning leaders face daunting demands, it pays to cultivate a purposeful vision. Agile skills are the most valuable gift you can give to people, to your organization, and to yourself.
Read on for actions to prioritize today and ideas to inspire tomorrow.
Priority 1
Lean in to analytics.
As shared at the top of the report, aligning learning programs to business strategies is L&D’s No. 1 focus area for the second year in a row. It’s no surprise that L&D pros are cultivating their data literacy.
Priority 2
Build the right metrics.
Aligning learning to business is still a new muscle for L&D pros. Many are still preoccupied with “vanity metrics,” such as employee satisfaction or the number of trainings delivered (regardless of efficacy).
Success starts with small experiments to gauge progress on critical priorities. For those who do chart business outcomes, productivity and performance are the most common objectives.
Priority 3
Polish your human skills for the age of AI.
Taking a deeper dive into skill trends, we see L&D pros adding a range of additional human skills (or soft skills) to meet the demands and opportunities of the AI era.
At the risk of stating the obvious, don’t forget to prioritize your own learning.
Priority 4
Embrace the power of constant growth.
As skills evolve to meet AI opportunities, learning and growth will be central to jobs.
Increasingly, daily work will include microlearning (or even “nanolearning”) — short bursts of instruction to help people make progress in small bites. Engaging, personalized, and flexible learning in the flow of work helps people solve specific problems and invest in their futures without dropping a ball.
As you prepare yourself and your organization for the age of AI, take inspiration in the six bites below. The thoughts are succinct, but the visions are big.
Bold idea:What if CLOs become Chief Skills Officers?
Many C-suite executives don’t understand the real value of learning: they see it as just a benefit or nice-to-have. When you talk to business leaders, their questions will instead revolve around business strategy, and how learning will help you get there. So even if Chief Learning Officers don’t officially change our titles, we should think of ourselves as Chief Skills Officers, or Chief Upskilling Officers, in charge of strategically building skills that will drive tangible outcomes for the business.
Amanda Nolen
Co-Founder at NilesNolenBold idea:What if companies incentivize their leaders to export their talent?
LinkedIn research shows that only 19% of employees are encouraged by their organizations to explore internal role changes. What is often getting in the way is leaders’ fear of losing their top talent without the ability to backfill. Imagine a future where leaders are considered talent builders and they are rewarded for exporting talent to other departments in their organization. Imagine a future where not just managers, but executives sponsor and model internal movement themselves. By unlocking doors for our in-house talent, there’s no limit to the innovation that becomes possible for both our employees and our organizations.
Stephanie Conway
Senior Director, Talent Development at LinkedInBold idea:What if our talent rotations span across companies?
Internal mobility is a great idea for individual companies, but what if we think even bigger? A cross-company (or even cross-industry) talent exchange program with temporary position swaps among employees with comparable functions and tenure levels would accelerate skill-building for all. This initiative, spanning vendor-customer partnerships and collaborations across various sectors, would introduce fresh perspectives, promote an exchange of best practices, and enrich skill sets. Employees would gain a deeper understanding of diverse business environments, contributing to a more dynamic, adaptable workforce.
Chris Louie
Head of Talent Development at Thomson ReutersBold idea:What if we blur the lines between education and work?
We need to demolish artificial silos between pipeline development, talent acquisition, learning, and workforce planning. Let’s build one continuous talent-curation cycle with human-centered, market-aligned pathways connecting middle school, high school, and post-secondary learners to quality jobs. Take United Airlines, who faced a pilot shortage; they created Aviate, a training academy with scholarships and hands-on learning intended to diversify their historically white male pilot pipeline. Corporations can — and should — build the talent they need. We all have the power to create something new if we can question and rebuild traditional structures.
Cat Ward
VP, Employer Mobilization at Jobs for the FutureBold idea:What if we treat career navigation as a mission-critical skill set?
Leveraging relationships, identifying strengths and interests, and tapping into personal curiosity are all things that can help employees grow their careers — and fuel retention within your organization. Finding ways to teach employees the skills and capabilities that can help them navigate their career in a self-sustaining way, outside of formal learning moments, will unlock growth for them and growth for your organization.
Al Dea
Founder at Edge of WorkBold idea:What if we make work about skills rather than roles?
The org chart has been the way we organize work for over 100 years. What if, instead, we organized the people around the work? Knowing the skills that people have allows organizations to bring in-house talent in as advisors, leaders, or specialists with the skills that are exactly right for a project. With a skills-first mindset, organizations help employees develop skills that are crucial to the organization’s success and interesting and fulfilling to the employees themselves. Internal talent pools become much more adaptable, mobility increases, and there is a natural incentive to develop new skills.
Dani Johnson
Co-Founder & Principal Analyst at RedThread Research
Explore more Workplace Learning data.
Finance | Healthcare | Professional services | Technology
| Benelux | India | Southeast Asia | United Kingdom
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Read methodology & acknowledgements.
Show all top 10 focus areas
Methodology
Survey data
The LinkedIn Learning 2024 Workplace Learning Report surveyed 1,636 L&D and HR professionals with L&D responsibilities who have some influence on budget decisions, and 1,063 learners. Surveyed geographies include: North America (United States, Canada); South America (Brazil); Asia-Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong); and Europe (United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria).
LinkedIn Learning product research
The insight that states, “Learners who set career goals engage with learning 4x more than those who don’t set goals” is based on studying a cohort of learners who initiated their LinkedIn Learning account between February 6 and February 10, 2023. We tracked engagement of these learners for the following 3 months and compared the difference in engagement levels for time spent learning between learners who did vs. did not set a career goal.
LinkedIn platform insights
Behavioral insights for this report were derived from the billions of data points generated by the 900 million members in over 200 countries on LinkedIn today. Specific analyses:
Fastest Growing Skills Data
This analysis looks at the Fastest Growing Skills among L&D professionals (globally) between October 6, 2022, and October 6, 2023. “Fastest Growing Skills” are the skills that have seen the largest year-over-year growth among L&D professionals specifically. One way to interpret these findings is to view fastest growing skills as the skills that are already important today — the skills that many members in a given population are developing and adding to their profiles.
Impact of Learning Culture
To determine whether companies have a stronger or weaker learning culture, we calculated the deciles to which they belong in each of the following categories and created a simple scoring index that assigned more points to companies demonstrating these components of learning culture, and fewer points to companies not demonstrating as many components of learning culture:
Skills development: the median number of skills employees added to their profile while they were employed in a position at the company in the last 12 months.
L&D team size: identified 40+ L&D occupations and the number of employees at each company in these occupations.
Learning-related company posts: given the large volume of company posts, we used the Bernoulli method to extract random samplings of company posts in the last 12 months and quantified the number of posts that mentioned ‘learning,’ ‘upskilling,’ and ‘skills’ in English.
The outcomes are defined as follows:
Internal mobility: All data reflects aggregated LinkedIn member activity as of August 2023. We’ve defined internal mobility as any point at which an employee took a new position at the same company in the last 12 months ending August 2023. To calculate internal mobility rates, we included only companies with at least 100 transitions and calculated the median rate.
Leadership promotions: We considered all internal promotions that occurred in the last 12 months by the company and calculated the percentage of leadership promotions that took place (i.e. member was promoted to a manager role or higher).
Retention: the median amount of time that all current employees have been employed with their company.
Acknowledgements
This report was informed by insightful contributions from learning leaders around the world, to whom we owe our sincere thanks, including:
Jenna Alexander at Randstad
Ekpedeme “Pamay” Bassey at Kraft Heinz
Shruti Bharadwaj at Airtel
Naphtali Bryant at Lucas Museum of Narrative Art
Li Juan Cheng at Chint New Energy
Stephanie Conway at LinkedIn
Al Dea at Edge of Work
Guillaume Delacour at ABB
Sara Dionne at Comcast
Dorna Eriksson Shafiei at Atlas Copco
Stephanie Fitzpatrick at UnitedHealth Group
Justin Foster at Radian
Alexandra Halem at Mars
Dr. Terri Horton at FuturePath, LLC
Dani Johnson at RedThread Research
Crystal Lim-Lange at Forest Wolf
Christopher Lind at ChenMed
Chris Louie at Thomson Reuters
Geraldine Murphy at The Heineken Company
Lori Niles-Hofmann at NilesNolen
Amanda Nolen at NilesNolen
Nick Shackleton-Jonesat Shackleton Consulting
Jennifer Shappleyat LinkedIn
Manpreet Singh Ahujaat PwC India
Sophie Wadeat Flexcel Network
Cat Wardat Jobs for the Future
Survey data
Alexander Foss
Stephanie Scalice
Meng Zhao
LinkedIn platform insights
Manas Mohapatra
Cesar Zulaica
Adriana Zurbano
Editorial & production
Anne McSilver
Sonya Bessalel
Carl Brinker
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