Features
Beyond the training calendar: Building continuous learning interventions
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…
From cost centre to growth engine: Enter the Chief Revenue Officer of Talent
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…
From crappy tasks to the C-suite: fixing the female leadership pipeline
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,…
When your boss is an AI bot
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…
Transfer by design: The next maturity level of learning design
Closing the transfer gap means designing for workplace application from the outset, not hoping learning will stick afterwards. Melanie Martinelli and Ger Driesen explain how the 12 Levers of Transfer Effectiveness can help L&D teams build stronger transfer conditions, establish shared standards and connect learning more clearly to organisational performance. Your learning program is well designed. The facilitators are strong. Participation is high and the feedback scores look reassuring. Then people return to work. Three months later, managers struggle to…
The AI fire hydrant: L&D’s new job is to redesign the pipework
AI can make the creation of work dramatically faster. Unless L&D helps their organisation to change how work moves, gets judged and turns into value, the result will be pressure, not progress: stress on teams that are already at capacity, using process that weren’t designed for AI, says Erica Farmer. I keep hearing a version of the same story; someone uses AI to produce a first draft, analysis or set of options in a fraction of the usual time. Their…
The invisible workload of leading organisational change
Build change capability across every leadership by combining mindset shifts, practical training and coaching. Melanie Franklin explains why people development professionals must make change management explicit, scalable and aspirational, helping managers respond confidently to uncertainty, support their teams and turn constant disruption into a source of organisational strength and progress. With every business under constant pressure to adapt to technological, environmental, and social shifts, change has become a permanent part of working life. Yet while 61% of organisations recognise change…
My journey from HR to the c-suite, and what I learned along the way
A cold shift in a supermarket set an unexpected career in motion. Tom Emery traces the decisions led to the C-suite. Reflecting on setbacks, stretch roles and hard-won lessons, he shows how adaptability, relationships and courage can shape a career in the people profession far more than any grand plan. I was an accidental HR professional. Growing up, I wanted to work in public relations. I loved the sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. The characters, the outfits, the champagne and I thought…
Striking the right balance between productivity and workplace wellbeing
Build sustainable productivity by redesigning work around focus, recovery and realistic capacity. Aleks Szymanski explains how leaders can reduce overload, encourage breaks, set clear expectations, use technology thoughtfully and model healthy boundaries, creating cultures where wellbeing strengthens performance, engagement, retention and resilience rather than competing with them at work daily. For years, productivity and wellbeing were framed as competing priorities. Push harder, the thinking went, and performance would rise, even if people paid the price. Today, that approach is proving…
Beyond the management ladder: Why Gen Z is redefining career success
Rethink training, leadership and career progression to retain Gen Z talent. Tara Ceranic Salinas explains why younger workers value time, flexibility, mastery and meaningful impact over traditional management titles, and how organisations can create learning cultures that build skills, recognise strengths and support sustainable growth at work for everyone involved. Every generation has their own ideas about what work should look like. Climbing the corporate ladder and reaching the pinnacles of management used to be the aim, but Gen Z…
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