Dive Brief:
- Participation of learning and development leaders in business strategy discussions has steadily declined over the last three of RedThread Research’s biennial reports, according to the company’s study published June 3.
- Despite this trend, L&D isn’t becoming irrelevant, RedThread said. Instead, many leaders “have stopped fighting for a strategy seat and started closing capability gaps directly,” per the report, working more directly with the functions they serve.
- Meanwhile, workers tend to rely on manager feedback and stretch assignments to help them develop skills, rather than using standard L&D frameworks. In fact, “none of the traditional L&D-owned methods ranked in the top 10” of methods relied upon for development, RedThread said.
Dive Insight:
The research suggests that it may be time to rethink how to enable employee learning where work actually happens, RedThread said.
The study said most L&D functions are “still operating at a distance from the work.” However, at companies where that gap has been closed, L&D was more connected to the business and functioned “closer to where decisions get made.” In addition, those leaders are more confident in their data decisions, and more likely to consult a wider number of team members when shaping organizational strategy.
“Some leaders are looking at their role not as a strategic pillar that needs to be invited to all of the tables, but rather as a strategic-tactical team on the ground that enables things wherever they are,” Dani Johnson, co-founder and principal analyst at RedThread, said in a statement. “Our hypothesis is that L&D becomes a tactical operator that enables things in the organization, rather than a standalone silo on the side.”
L&D leaders said performance on the job was their top priority in terms of making investments in development technology over the next two to three years, ranking it higher than either content creation or management.
“A lot of the technology has focused on managing and creating experiences,” Johnson said. “And now, for the first time ever, we’re focusing on performing more on the job. That is a very positive step.”
According to Info-Tech’s IT Talent Trends 2025 report, many companies’ training cycles aren’t keeping pace with the quickly evolving needs of today’s information technology workers. Even though IT employees’ core responsibilities are constantly changing, many companies are still treating learning “as a periodic initiative rather than as part of operational execution,” per the report.
Notably, HR Dive’s 2026 Identity of HR survey found that the number of respondents who cited employee training as a top priority at their company rose 4 percentage points year over year, from 5% to 9%.