Features
L&D in the age of reinvention: Four imperatives for the CLO
Chief Learning Officers are being asked to reinvent organisations, while AI rewires jobs and careers. The route is unlearning: letting go of ladders, fixed roles and ‘training as an event’. Dr Helmut Schuster and Dr David Oxley set out four imperatives for CLOs to build experimentation, trust, AI and capability. We are entering an era in which organisational reinvention is not optional. It is constant and structural. Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping roles and workflows. Career ladders are collapsing into…
From breakdown to backbone: Helping people thrive under selfish leaders
Selfish leaders can drain confidence, distort reality and trigger burnout, but support can be a turning point. Drawing on a case study, this article shares coaching tools to build awareness, protect boundaries and respond strategically. Josefine Campbell shows how clients can restore resilience, reclaim agency and even thrive at work. Selfish leaders prioritise their personal gain over the well-being of their teams and can create a toxic ripple effect in the workplace. Whether as a professional coach, an empathetic colleague,…
From content library to customer behaviour engine
Treat customer and partner education as a business system that speeds adoption, cuts support demand and lifts renewals. Start with outcomes, design for decisive journey moments, and prioritise time-to-value over course volume. Embed guidance in workflows, build modular role pathways, and measure behaviour change end-to-end, writes Brett Strauss, for results. Many organisations still treat customer and partner education as an extension of employee training, but the most effective programmes are designed quite differently. The organisations seeing the strongest results treat…
Your learning strategy makes too much sense
The New Coke fiasco in the ‘80s shows why L&D keeps repeating the same mistakes. When we design learning for the ‘logical human’, engagement, behaviour change and budgets suffer. Design instead for real people, who are time-poor, emotional and context-driven, will mean you bubble to the top. Matt Furness explores. In 1985, Coca-Cola did something that looked perfectly reasonable in a spreadsheet, but utterly deranged in real life. Their market share had been slipping for 15 years and Pepsi was swaggering around, winning…
From job redesign to work transformation: How organisations can future-proof roles in the age of AI and skills shortages
Technology isn’t the blocker, work design is. Many organisations trap people in low-value tasks while layering AI onto old workflows. Johnson Wong argues leaders must shift from updating job descriptions to transforming how work flows at task level, prioritising high-impact roles, and investing in skills to unlock productivity and engagement. Across industries, leaders are confronting the same paradox: technology is advancing faster than organisations can adapt, yet productivity growth remains stubbornly slow. AI tools are proliferating, automation investments are rising,…
When leaders run on empty, strategy turns into firefighting
Workplace stress is surging, executive burnout is a systemic risk to organisational performance. In a DUSTy polycrisis world, traditional wellbeing initiatives barely touch the root causes. Steve Macaulay sets out a practical HR and L&D roadmap to redesign roles, build psychological safety, embed structured support and impact the whole organisation. The signs of workplace stress are everywhere: UK sickness absence is at its highest for 15 years. According to a CIPD survey, 64% of organisations are taking steps to identify…
The risk radar that stops culture biting back
Most leadership programmes scale fast on assumptions that only unravel in the room. A genuine pilot surfaces hidden beliefs, resistance and the workplace conditions that make behaviour change stick, before the full investment lands. Jimmy Burroughes argues against biased, stacked pilots and shows how to test important reality, not optimism. Most leadership programmes are designed and decided before anyone enters the training room. The content is chosen, facilitators are booked, the business case clears the board or approvals committee, and…
From learning to earning: A practical framework for skills-based compensation and workforce agility
Skills-based pay is gaining traction as organisations seek clearer returns from workplace learning and really embedding this in culture. By linking skill development, assessment and reward, companies can boost motivation, target critical capabilities and strengthen agility. Johnson Wong outlines a practical framework and maturity pathway to start then scale responsibly. Many organisations are investing heavily in workplace learning. Yet a persistent challenge remains: how do we ensure learning translates into real workforce capability and business value? Skills-based pay is an…
L&D’s biggest influence barrier is access to decision-makers
L&D can’t make impact visible an important from the side-lines. The TJ Readiness Enablers Index shows that the biggest bottleneck to meaningful change is access to decision-makers about strategy, budget and priorities. While L&D has momentum, readiness is inconsistent, and influence depends on being close enough to shape action early. In a context of L&D focusing on impact, including grappling with how to measure it, how to evidence it, how to report it and how to make it visible to…
How to lead when everyone is in survival mode
Survival mode at work is often invisible, showing up as relational drift, polite avoidance and quiet withdrawal. Kerry-Lyn Stanton-Downes explains why individual wellbeing fixes fall short and instead asserts that relational capacity creates psychological safety. Her pathway, regulate, relate, reconnect, offers leaders and L&D a practical way to rebuild trust. We all know the experience of survival mode. The meeting where the energy is wrong before anyone has said a word. The conversation that stays polite on the surface while…
Want smart, useful L&D insight in your inbox (without the fluff)?
Subscribe to our weekly newsletter for Editor-only commentary, and exclusive insight that isn’t published anywhere else online.
If you want a quick roundup of what matters, fresh ideas you can use, and the best new reads from Training Journal, this is where it lands
It’s free, only takes a minute, and you can unsubscribe any time.
