Features

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Stronger partnerships start with financial fluency

Jane Deeks

Financial fluency helps L&D professionals manage external partnerships with greater clarity and accountability. Jane Deeks explains how to spot compliance risks, strengthen contracts, and work effectively with finance and legal teams. All to build ethical, transparent relationships that protect budgets, reputations and long-term learning impact across their organisations and partners. In an increasingly interconnected learning and development landscape, trainers are no longer operating in isolation. Collaborations with external partners, whether with freelance specialists, technology vendors, or contracted content providers, have…

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Why AI-Generated content is becoming harder for L&D teams to manage

Chris Van Wingerden

As AI accelerates content production, Chris Van Wingerden stresses that L&D teams face a new bottleneck: managing the volume of learning content they can create. Drawing on dominKnow’s LCMS Report, he explores why content management, governance and human oversight are becoming essential to keeping AI-generated learning trustworthy, compliant and useful. For years, the learning industry has focused on one persistent challenge: creating enough content to keep pace with organisational change. Today, that challenge looks very different. AI has transformed the…

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Learning without limits: Meeting the expectations of the modern workforce

Morgan Burn

Morgan Burn explores how changing attention, technology and learner expectations are reshaping workplace development, and why L&D must move beyond isolated interventions. From personalised reflection to richer content and real-world scenarios, organisations need better continuous learning ecosystems that help people access, apply and revisit knowledge precisely when it matters most. There is a widespread perception that attention spans are getting shorter. A 2022 survey by the Policy Institute and Centre for Attention Studies at King’s College London found that almost half…

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Connecting the dots across assessment data

Dan Harrison

Dan Harrison and Kimberly Farace argue that assessment teams need better connections between fragmented data, not more dashboards. By linking operational, technical, behavioural and candidate feedback signals across the journey, organisations can uncover hidden microtrends, diagnose friction faster, strengthen integrity and make more confident, targeted improvements to candidate experience overall. Programs aren’t struggling to grow globally or meet candidates’ needs because they lack data. They’re struggling because the complete story is hidden. When assessment and credentialing teams can’t see the…

The hidden cost of hybrid work: Rebuilding informal learning for early-career employees

Don Spear

Early-career employees need more than formal training to build judgement, confidence and practical their skills. Hybrid work and AI have made every-day learning less visible and more important. Don Spear explains how organisations can recreate observation, coaching, practice and feedback to help people move more quickly from potential to performance. Companies face a talent-development challenge that many leaders overlook. Early-career employees still need the learning that happens around the work, not just the training that organisations assign to them. For…

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From empathy to action: How L&D can build compassionate workplaces

Nicky McCrudden

Nicky McCrudden explores why compassion at work so often stops at good intentions and how L&D can help turn concern into action. Her research identifies skills gaps, workplace beliefs and social pressures as key barriers, pointing to practical, scenario-based ways to build confidence, strengthen connection and create more compassionate workplaces. Compassion deficits in the workplace, where colleagues’ suffering goes unnoticed or unaddressed and anti-compassionate behaviours, are driving costly outcomes that organisations know all too well. Productivity losses from poor mental health…

CONTINUOUS LEARNING

Beyond the training calendar: Building continuous learning interventions

Nikhil Sharma

L&D needs to move beyond periodic programmes and participation metrics, building continuous interventions that respond to real workplace challenges. By listening closely, reinforcing behaviour and measuring meaningful outcomes, learning teams can become strategic partners. Nikhil Sharma explores how this shift can improve managers, culture and employees’ everyday experience of work. The session receives excellent feedback, participants leave energised, and certificates are distributed. Three months later, however, attrition in the team remains high, employees continue to report unclear expectations, and the…

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From cost centre to growth engine: Enter the Chief Revenue Officer of Talent

Barb Hyman

Barb Hyman argues that talent acquisition and talent management must stop operating in silos and start acting as a single business engine. By connecting hiring, internal mobility and learning to commercial outcomes, organisations can reduce restructuring costs, deploy skills more effectively and make talent a genuine driver of value creation. Somewhere over the Atlantic, I keep circling back to a question I hear in boardrooms everywhere: why do we still treat talent as a cost centre, when in reality it…

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From crappy tasks to the C-suite: fixing the female leadership pipeline

Steve Macaulay

Women often outperform men on key leadership measures, particularly collaboration, relationships and crisis management, yet barriers still block their route to senior roles. David Buchanan and Steve Macaulay examine the evidence and set out what HR and L&D can do to strengthen the leadership pipeline and stop wasting valuable talent. Recent studies have found that women make better leaders than men. This is a compelling reason, beyond equality and diversity, for appointing women to senior management positions. In this article,…

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When your boss is an AI bot

Steve Macaulay

David Buchanan and Steve Macaulay explore how AI could reshape leadership, from augmenting decision-making to taking over selected management tasks. They examine the benefits, risks and human implications of bot bosses, and argue that L&D must prepare employees to challenge, collaborate with and, when necessary, override artificial leaders at work. Could artificially intelligent (AI) bots take over leadership roles?  What are the implications for human resource management, and for learning and development? AI can display cognitive abilities that allow it…