L&D Professionals
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,…
What is helping or holding back your L&D impact?
Impact depends on more than measurement. This reflection asks whether you have the access, data, permission and support needed to act on what you learn. Use it to sense-check your current reality, spot what may be holding progress back, and add your perspective to TJ’s wider research this year too. It’s easy to talk about L&D impact as if it is mainly a question of measurement. What are we tracking? What data do we have? How do we prove value?…
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…
Executive sponsorship is mostly theatre. Here’s what real looks like
Ben Satchwell argues most executive sponsorship is theatre: a budget sign-off, a launch email, a kick-off cameo. Prosci research shows active, visible sponsorship is the biggest driver of change success. Ben sets out five behaviours real sponsors demonstrate, from owning the why to spending political capital and handling resistance personally. Ask any capability framework project who the executive sponsor is and you will get a name instantly. Ask what that sponsor actually does, and the answer is usually thinner: they…
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…
TJ podcast: L&D needs to stop talking about learning, with Cathy Hoy – episode 332
What does it take for L&D leaders to now think more commercially, connect learning to business outcomes and move way beyond delivery? Cathy Hoy talks strategic thinking, the limits of ROI, the importance of understanding the business, and how L&D can build greater influence, confidence and impact across the organisation. Key takeaways: Podcast summary: Should L&D leaders stop talking about learning? That’s one of the provocations in the latest TJ podcast, where Jo Cook speaks with Cathy Hoy about what it…
The future of work isn’t a younger workforce. It’s more flexibility
Sara Daw argues that L&D must look beyond traditional full-time employment to unlock the value of a multigenerational workforce. By embracing fractional, flexible and blended working models, organisations can retain experienced talent, strengthen mentoring and succession planning, and gain the fresh insights needed to build greater resilience for the future. How do L&D professionals plan for the future of work? Focus may logically fall on developing the younger workforce to ensure business longevity. But today’s workplaces are already multigenerational, and…
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…
Why AI automation fails when organisations move too fast
Redesign workflows before deploying AI to avoid costly failures and build responsible automation. Dr Wendy Lynch explains what organisations can learn from flawed chatbots, biased recruitment tools and rushed cost-cutting, and why governance, stress-testing, human oversight and thoughtful process design are the foundations of effective, trustworthy AI adoption at scale. AI Automation is expanding exponentially and improving rapidly. As we leap ahead, it’s helpful to learn from the stumbles made by early pioneers. The cautionary tales around AI tend to…
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