I’ve always held strong opinions on how organizations tackle learning, development and career growth. Rarely have I come across solutions that truly impressed me, though I’ve never questioned their importance. When I began my career, assigned learning hours, in‑person training sessions, and large learning and development teams that swore by the 70:20:10 rule were the norm. And in many ways, that setup worked. The world’s pace of change still marched in tandem with the human learning curve.
However, over the years, things have changed. In‑person training moved to online on-demand, learning teams shrunk, and employees are now expected to learn in their own time—while juggling countless urgent deliverables. Meanwhile, technology advanced at breakneck speed, especially over the past four years since ChatGPT emerged, far outpacing the linear human learning curve. It often feels like the faster technology moves, the more organizations put learning on life support.
I understand the reasoning: we need to deliver faster, do more, and keep pace with competitors or risk falling behind. For organizations, people are expendable. We’ve always known that. So, if we want to stay relevant, we must find time to learn, adapt, and keep pace with the companies we work for—or hope to work for.
That’s why, although I usually skip the LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report each year, this time I took the time to pour over the 2025 edition carefully and write about it. Everyone I talk to feels the pressure to keep learning or risk losing their job (not always to AI, though the constant tech apocalypse chatter doesn’t help). So where are we now? Burnt candles at both ends, late nights? Well, LinkedIn’s report states learning as a competitive advantage for organizations. But is anyone really listening? It seems 36% of organizations are.
The report includes several striking data points including 49% of talent and development professionals agreeing that “My executives are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to execute our business strategy.” It also contains this line (which one hopes was written by a human) – When employees don’t move ahead, they leave and take their skills elsewhere. By investing in career development, employers counteract the anxiety that comes with rapid change by building loyalty, energy, and innovation for the next era of work. In short, great companies are built on great careers.
So here I am, reflecting on my top three takeaways from the report. The biggest one? Nothing in it is new—and yet we, along with many organizations, continue to look the other way.
Create Space: The report makes one thing abundantly clear: the biggest blocker to meaningful progress in career development is space.
The report literally says, ‘What’s standing in the way of bigger leaps forward on career development? A picture emerges: Managers, employees, and talent teams are all stretched too thin to go beyond daily work and make progress for their teams, themselves, and their organizations. Managers, employees, and talent teams are stretched far too thin to think beyond the demands of daily work’.
Years ago, most organizations set aside defined hours for learning. Over time, that evolved into “on‑the‑job” learning, and now “learn on your own time.”
Unlike machines, human beings have limits. They tire, and they seek time for joy, rest, and life outside of work. This reality makes unrealistic the expectation that employees will continuously learn while being stretched to their limits. Machines may thrive on constant output, but humans evolve best when given room to breathe, reflect, and experiment.
“Create space” has long been one of my guiding philosophies. I often ask leaders, have you created space for your team members? It is within this blank space that innovation, learning, and experimentation take root. None of these flourish under stress.
The report acknowledges the issue, yet it stops short of recommending what seems to me the most obvious remedy, instead focusing on other solutions. Perhaps I am naïve in believing that creating space is a realistic solution in today’s world.
Managers Are the Key: Headlines about managerial cuts in big tech have become common. Meta reportedly has managers overseeing close to fifty people, and Google recently reduced around a third of its managerial roles, arguing that leadership should make up a smaller share of the workforce. It is not the first time the question of whether managers are essential has surfaced. Google even tried operating without them back in 2002, only to later confirm through Project Oxygen that good managers matter deeply to performance and engagement. Yet the same debate resurfaces every decade, from Holacracy in 2015 to AI agents in 2025.
In contrast, the 2025 report reinforces managers as central to employee growth. Yet only 15% of employees say their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months, a fall of 5 percentage points from last year, reflecting just how overstretched this group has become. The challenge is not the existence of managers or them not doing their job. It is what the role has turned into. They are expected to handle execution, communication, inclusion, morale, and constant change, often without the tools or time to lead thoughtfully. They have become shock absorbers for organizational strain, expected to fix what systems break.
Like technical debt in software, this growing “managerial debt” eventually catches up. The real question for manager effectiveness now is not whether we need them, but how we can reimagine their work. What can be automated or streamlined? What can be delegated or redistributed to others? If we can do that well, managers can refocus on what AI cannot do, building trust, guiding growth, shaping culture, and connecting people to purpose.
If learning and growth are truly competitive advantages, then enabling managers must be a priority. They are not redundant layers but multipliers of trust, engagement, and culture. Remove or overburden them, and what’s lost isn’t hierarchy—it’s humanity.
There’s a lot about AI: Learning has always mattered, but rarely has it dominated the conversation as much as it does today. Few events have disrupted work and triggered such a scramble for new skills as the acceleration of AI and the rise of intelligent agents. So, it’s no surprise that AI threads through the report as both the cause and the solution.
AI is already embedded in how we work, learn, and make decisions. It is reshaping not only what we learn, but also how we learn and why we prioritize certain skills in the first place. The 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report highlights AI as a powerful enabler, helping talent teams design personalized pathways and deliver training more efficiently. Yet it also exposes a growing gap between the speed of technological change and the human capacity to absorb it. Employees are urged to “embrace AI tools,” often without the time, context, or confidence to do so effectively.
Like my previous gripe, what’s missing from the narrative is a balanced recognition that AI should act as a companion to learning, not a replacement for it. Technology can make knowledge more accessible, but it cannot replace curiosity, time, or psychological safety—all essential ingredients for true growth. The optimism around AI is understandable; it mirrors the excitement sweeping every industry. Still, I wish the same energy went into understanding the human side of learning—the slow, messy, deeply personal process that no algorithm can replicate.
In essence, AI may be the greatest catalyst for learning today, but unless organizations invest as seriously in human capacity as they do in technology, the result will be smarter tools and burnt‑out people.
Like it or not, accelerated learning is no longer optional. Organizations can either support their people to learn effectively, or hope they pick things up alone—and be replaced when they don’t. One is smart business; the other isn’t. For HR professionals, the question is simple: how are we guiding our organizations to choose the first path?
The HR Business Partner Story 