The latest L&D news, reports, research and updates, personally compiled by TJ’s Editor, Jo Cook. This week: AI fuels cognitive strain in teams and raises questions over who manages hybrid workforces, UK hiring stalls, resilience training lags, and new interview research reveals how candidates prepare and what hiring managers notice.
The Expert-to-Presenter Gap
Enterprises invest over $350 billion annually in corporate training, yet the most valuable training they could deliver — knowledge transfer from their own subject matter experts — is systematically undermined by a combination of presentation anxiety, poor tooling, and misaligned formats.
This research synthesis brings together data from multiple published studies, industry surveys, and academic research to quantify what we call “The Expert-to-Presenter Gap”: the measurable distance between the knowledge experts hold and the knowledge that actually reaches the people who need it.
- $4.5M lost per enterprise annually from knowledge sharing failures
- 42% of institutional knowledge lives in individual heads only
AI may be helping employees prepare for career mobility
Companies that invest in employee experiences but overlook how much their abilities and expectations are changing may face challenges. “Employees want opportunities to grow, and AI may be accelerating their capabilities and expectations more quickly than workplace systems can adapt,” the report said.
As workers use artificial intelligence to explore career development opportunities both at their current jobs and at other organisations, it has created “a new form of workforce misalignment,” according to a University of Phoenix white paper.
Corporate conversations about AI productivity are mostly focused on future gains
About 95% of artificial intelligence-related productivity discussions on corporate earnings calls from 2000 through 2025 discuss future gains, according to a new study from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. By comparison, about 75% of productivity conversations not involving AI were future-facing, the report said. As a result, study authors concluded that executives are largely optimistic about AI’s impact on productivity.
However, the forward-looking impact of AI also suggests that while companies are “investing, experimenting and reorganising around AI today,” the majority of the “measurable productivity effects remain mostly ahead,” per the report.
AI autonomously taking over tasks may not reduce employees’ mental workload
A joint study conducted by the Department of Psychology at Lingnan University has found that while AI helps maintain employee performance during surges in workload, allowing it to autonomously decide when to take over and relinquish control may make it difficult for users to regain situational awareness, thereby increasing mental fatigue and even leading to human-machine conflict.
AI brain fry: How Artificial Intelligence is reshaping human cognition at work
As AI becomes increasingly integrated into everyday work, many employees report feeling mentally exhausted rather than cognitively liberated. Cognitive overload, divided attention, information saturation, and decision fatigue have occupied psychologists for decades.
AI has not created these challenges; rather, it has reshaped the environment in which they occur. The result is a workplace in which employees are expected not only to perform their own work, but also to continually monitor, evaluate, and refine the work produced by intelligent machines.
Who owns the workforce when half of it isn’t human?
Organisations are grappling with an unmanaged “agentic” workforce of AI systems, creating a critical leadership void. HR must urgently expand its scope beyond human capital to orchestrate these hybrid human-agent systems. Future CHROs must become accountable for total organisational capacity, designing work to leverage AI while preserving essential human judgment.
This involves developing employees for new orchestration roles, actively mitigating the “developmental debt” caused by AI removing traditional learning “grind,” and embedding trust into these evolving systems. HR’s failure to claim this expanded mandate risks its relevance, as other functions are poised to seize leadership of the future workforce.
Employers keep hiring on hold as jobs growth flatlines, new CIPD research finds
UK employers continue to take a cautious approach to hiring, with the latest Labour Market Outlook from the CIPD finding that employer confidence remains close to record lows, outside of the pandemic, and has shown no signs of recovery since spring 2025.
The survey of more than 2,000 UK employers found that:
- The net employment balance – the difference between employers expecting staff levels to rise and those expecting them to fall in the next three months – remains at +9, close to its lowest level outside the pandemic
- Private sector employment intentions are at a joint low outside the pandemic of +11, first reached in spring 2025, and largely unchanged since
- Just 57% of private sector employers plan to recruit in the next three months, also a joint low outside the pandemic
2026 Workforce State of Mind
Chronic strain has become the baseline. It’s not just the acute stress of a high-stakes deadline or a single bad quarter. It’s now a persistent hum of work that is always on, competing demands, shifting priorities, and the pressure to keep pace with AI tools and changes that keep coming. It’s widespread, it’s relentless, and most organisations haven’t caught up to it yet.
- Budget cuts, not AI, are the top disruptor of the day to day in the UK and France
- Only half of employees in France feel supported by their direct manager
- 73% in Germany, 70% in France, and 64% in the UK have had zero hours of resilience training this year
The interview advantage: Preparing beyond the resume
To better understand how people prepare for interviews, Adobe surveyed over 1,000 Americans, including 756 job seekers and 251 hiring managers. The results show a clear gap between how candidates think they should prepare, what helps them feel confident and perform well in the moment, and what hiring managers are actually looking for during interviews.
- Nearly three-quarters of job seekers surveyed now leverage AI for interview preparation, yet Gen Z respondents are actually 13% less likely to adopt these tools than older generations
- Men are most likely to freeze when asked about their weaknesses (34%) while women are most likely to freeze when asked about a time they failed (45%)
- Two in three hiring managers surveyed (66%) claim they can determine if a candidate is a culture fit in 10 minutes or less
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