Key themes of learning

Elevating Talent: Essential L&D Trends at Learning Technologies 2025

We will be attending the Learning Technologies Conference at the ExCeL in London on April 23rd & 24th. Hopefully we will see you there!

In preparation for the Conference, we have put together a document on the key themes being explored this year, why these themes are important and some examples of how the themes can be embedded within an organisation.

Skills, talent and learning

Looking at understanding the skills of your organisation to align talent and learning with business goals, putting L&D at the heart of the business.

Becoming a skills-based organisation means putting skills and competencies, rather than jobs at the center of your organisation’s development and recruitment planning. To achieve this requires an understanding of the skills within your organisation and of the skills you will need in the future. This new approach to work has led to significant results. Skills-based organisations are:

98% more likely to retain top performers
107% more likely to place talent effectively
79% more likely to have a positive workforce experience

We have been working with organisations to help them identify the skills within their organisations. Our Self Evaluation Tool with Tesco allows a user to build up a portfolio of skills and use that information to identify roles that would be a good match whilst also allowing Tesco to identify the skills in the organisation and where they sit.

Key things to consider:

Have you defined the skills in your organisation and mapped them against existing roles?
Are you collecting the skills data, regardless of their role, from your colleagues?
Do you have a system in place for reporting on skill changes, skills gaps and using this data to feed into where you invest your budget?

Professional development

What are the key skills and attitudes to be successful today? How can you accelerate your career? And how can you stay curious during these demanding times?

Motivating colleagues to carry out professional development by linking it to career progression is essential. A 2023 study found that only 15% of employees say their organisation encouraged them to move to a new role or build a career development plan.

Empowering colleagues to take their career and professional development is essential. Managers are often essential to engagement. In fact, 70% of the variance in team engagement is determined solely by the manager.

Therefore, creating a shared management and leadership philosophy as well as empowering colleagues, thereby reducing dependence on managers to be the source of engagement for employees is a key approach for large organisations in 2025.

Working with Gatwick we have created a Career Map that allows people to explore all of the roles within the organisation, receive guidance on career development and plan for their own personal development.

Key things to consider:

Are you monitoring and measuring internal mobility rates?
Do you capture data e.g from a staff survey, on how easy colleagues find it to understand what opportunities are available to them?
Do you have a self serve area where employees can find out about the roles that are available to them?

AI, data and analytics

Showing impact is more important than ever for L&D, but it can’t be done with activity metrics. On this track, we’ll look at how to understand, interpret and report on data to work as part of the business.

Do you know more about your customers than your colleagues? If so you wouldn’t be alone. However, with so many interaction points with your colleagues we should be able to understand their needs and the performance of the systems in place in helping them achieve those aims.

PWC found that data-driven organisations are three times more likely to report significant improvement in decision-making, yet, 62% of executives still rely more on experience and advice than data to make decisions

To understand your ROI and how effectively you are investing in L&D, defining the metrics and the KPIs from supporting systems is essential. These need to be identified up front with a clear measurement and reporting strategy. The adage goes “you can’t manage what you can’t measure” so whether it is the effectiveness of training, engagement from employees or skills gaps in the organisation having a systemised way of capturing and reporting on this data is a necessity.

Key things to consider:

How do you measure ROI on your L&D budget?
Do you have a clear understanding of how colleagues are engaging with your platforms?
How do you report on the performance of training and platforms?

Learning experience design

Design in learning has come a long way, from focusing on content to putting the learner experience first and optimising it for personal and organisational impact.

Only 29% of HR professionals think that their HR systems are fit for the modern workforce. At the heart of this is a poor user experience with the top two reasons for changing HR systems being the employee experience and the quality of the user interface.

Changing an HR system or an LMS is not an easy, or cheap, project to undertake. We have been working with several organisations to build on top of their existing technology to radically improve the user experience without the need to start over again on a new platform.

Key things to consider:

Do you have a clear understanding of how colleagues are engaging with your platforms?
Do you collect colleague feedback on the performance of your L&D tools?
Have you got a fully responsive offering that can be used across devices to colleagues across all work environments?

Programme implementation

How do you design, implement and deliver a high quality programme across your organisation?

Whether it’s an onboarding programme for every colleague or a leadership programme for your senior colleagues, delivering structured programmes is becoming an increasingly important way to deliver a structured, formalised experience that leads to a more consistent and positive employee experience.

This approach ensures that foundational concepts are mastered before moving on to more complex ones, creating a robust and stable learning foundation. Programmes also incorporate clear learning objectives, assessments, and feedback mechanisms, allowing for consistent progress monitoring and targeted support. By following a defined sequence, learners are less likely to encounter gaps in their understanding, and you can more effectively track and measure learning outcomes. A structured programme based approach promotes efficiency, consistency, and a higher likelihood of successful knowledge acquisition.

Key things to consider:

Do you have a universal digital onboarding or induction programme?
Do you collect colleague feedback on the performance of your L&D tools?
Have you got a fully responsive offering that can be used across devices to colleagues across all work environments?

Creating experiences that connect

At Electric Circus we’re an experience-led team. We understand the challenges of recruiting, retaining and developing talent. Our expertise blends creativity, digital solutions and communications strategy to create experiences that engage and connect with your employees through every phase of the talent lifecycle.

Whether you’ve read something intriguing about what we’ve done for other companies, or you’ve got a challenge that you can’t get your head around. Or even if you just want to know where we got our name.

We’re always happy to chat. Get in touch below.

Let's work together

Written by Matt Fawthrop