Learning & Development: The CHRO’s guide to learning in the age of AI

Creating an effective L&D strategy starts with asking the right question: not "What should our people learn?" but "Where is the business going?" Before selecting any courses or designing trainings, identify the three to five high-level goals your organization is working toward. Every learning initiative should map directly to these business milestones.

Next, conduct a skills gap analysis using existing data sources like performance reviews, job descriptions, and employee surveys to visualize the distance between current capabilities and required competencies. Finally, define competencies rather than isolated skills. A competency combines skills, knowledge, and abilities working together to enable someone to succeed in a role and contribute to broader organizational goals.

Building a strong L&D strategy requires three core steps:

Align with business objectives. Be in the room where strategy is made. Identify your organization's top priorities and ensure every learning initiative supports them directly. Design the learning ecosystem. Use the 70:20:10 framework: 70% experiential learning, 20% social learning, and 10% formal training. Prioritize internal mobility. Enable upskilling and reskilling to move talent where it's needed most. Create internal talent marketplaces, personalize learning paths, and formalize job shadowing and mentorship programs to build workforce agility.

L&D has evolved from an operational necessity to a strategic lever for business success. According to LinkedIn's Workplace Learning Report 2025, 49% of learning and talent development professionals report that executives are concerned employees don't have the right skills to execute business strategy.

Organizations that get L&D right experience measurable benefits: retention improves because career progress is employees' number one motivation to learn; business agility increases as companies become 67% more confident in their ability to retain qualified talent; and AI readiness accelerates, with organizations that have robust development programs being 42% more likely to be frontrunners in Generative AI adoption.

Career progress is the number one motivation for employees to learn. When people see a path forward within the organization, they stay. According to Pew Research Center, 63% of employees who quit their jobs cited a lack of opportunities for advancement as a reason for leaving.

L&D gives employees tangible growth opportunities, helping them build the capabilities they need to perform in shifting contexts, navigate change with confidence, and contribute to innovation. When organizations invest in employee development, they signal that they value their people as individuals, which drives engagement, loyalty, and performance.

Learning and development directly impacts an organization's ability to compete. Skills that were relevant three years ago are becoming obsolete, and 88% of organizations cite employee retention as a top concern. Providing learning opportunities has become the number one retention strategy.

Beyond retention, L&D builds the critical skills organizations can't afford to lose. According to LinkedIn's 2025 report, the top 10 skills most frequently lost to attrition include business strategy, strategic planning, sales management, and team leadership. These skills require critical thinking, institutional knowledge, and the ability to navigate uncertainty, and they can only be developed over time, not onboarded.

Start by auditing your current L&D inventory. This saves time, budget, and employee cognitive load. Next, define what successful performance looks like at each proficiency level with specific, concrete examples. Vague competency definitions cause L&D initiatives to fail. Finally, adopt blended learning by combining self-paced online modules with instructor-led sessions for practice and application, and formalize social learning through structured mentorship programs.

Promote L&D by embedding it into daily work rather than treating it as separate from operations. Empower managers to act as coaches who discuss where employees want to grow, not just assign tasks. Train them to have open conversations about career aspirations and provide regular feedback. Enable hand-raisers for redeployment by creating mechanisms that allow employees to advocate for roles where they see a better fit. Build psychological safety so employees feel comfortable experimenting, failing fast, and sharing what they've learned across teams.

The most common mistake is starting in the wrong place. Organizations open a course catalog, browse what's available, and begin assigning trainings. It feels productive, but it rarely drives business outcomes.

Another frequent misstep is focusing on isolated skills rather than competencies. Skills tell you what a person needs to do, but competencies describe how they need to think, behave, and operate to perform at a high level.

Companies also fail when they leave social learning to chance instead of formalizing mentorship and peer development structures, or when they rely on gut feeling to identify skills gaps instead of using centralized performance data.

Conduct a skills gap analysis using existing data sources: performance reviews, safety reports, job descriptions, and employee survey data. This process visualizes the distance between current employee capabilities and the competencies required to achieve your business goals.

Continuous learning requires building a culture that treats development as an ongoing process, not a one-time event. Enable self-directed learning by opening up your learning library so employees can access point-of-need training when they need it, like a five-minute video right before a client call.

Create internal talent marketplaces that allow employees to explore different projects or roles, keeping high performers engaged even when they've outgrown their current positions. Personalize development paths using performance data, skills assessments, and career conversations to align individual aspirations with organizational needs.

Move beyond engagement and completion metrics to measure business impact. Define metrics that demonstrate how L&D investments support your organization's highest objectives: productivity, profitability, and risk mitigation. Ask yourself: How will this initiative help the company make money, save money, or mitigate risk? Track retention rates, internal promotion rates, time to productivity for new hires, and skills gap closure over time. For AI-related learning, measure adoption rates and the speed at which teams integrate new tools into workflows.

AI serves as both a learning challenge and a development opportunity. Treat it as an immediate skills gap to close (baseline fluency) and a long-term strategic capability to build (advanced skills). Prioritize emerging skills like agent orchestration and prompt fluency, human-AI collaboration design, ethical AI literacy, and data storytelling. Create conditions for AI learning to thrive: build psychological safety so employees can experiment and fail fast, empower teams to redesign processes with AI in mind, ensure leadership models curiosity and digital confidence, and establish mechanisms to share AI discoveries across teams.

AI helps L&D by automating repetitive, table-stakes training programs (compliance, onboarding basics, mandatory certifications), which gives teams bandwidth to focus on developing forward-thinking capabilities that determine long-term organizational success. AI accelerates skills gap identification by analyzing workforce data at scale, surfaces relevant learning content when employees need it most, and personalizes development paths based on individual performance and career aspirations. It also enables rapid iteration and experimentation, allowing organizations to test new learning approaches, gather feedback instantly, and adjust programs in real time. By handling foundational learning efficiently, AI creates space for L&D leaders to invest in the human elements that truly drive performance: coaching, mentorship, experiential learning, and culture-building.