Author's Note & Methodology

The scenario I see most often is leadership telling L&D that they're happy with how things are running. The programs are popular, onboarding lands, compliance is covered, and feedback scores are high. But we must ask the harder question: what has any of that actually done for the business? What moved because of it? In my experience, that's where we go missing—not because the work isn't good, but because we aren't expected to connect it to metrics leadership truly cares about.

Before this report gets into the data, I think it’s important to say that there is nothing wrong with where any L&D team finds themselves today. You are where you are - and any progress  should be celebrated. At the very least, you have a foundation.

When we ran the numbers on more than 1,000 L&D teams who've taken our Maturity Model assessment since its launch, we found that most of the industry sits somewhere between levels 2 and 3 on our five point scale. 

While L&D teams that sit at Level 2-3 have a foundation, it’s worth noting that staying at that level can come at a personal and professional cost. That’s because you remain an order-taker. You give design, delivery, and relentless effort, but get little strategic authority in return. Like the "office Wi-Fi," you become essential yet invisible, your standing tied entirely to whichever executive happens to sponsor you. 

Climbing to Levels 4 and 5 buys you out of that cycle. It isn't just about better training design; it’s about acquiring real job control: the standing to say no to low-value work, the authority to shape your priorities, and a seat where your contribution is judged on business impact rather than popularity. Aligning with business goals and speaking the language of risk and revenue transforms L&D from a perceived cost center into a strategic partner, delivering the autonomy, health, and career longevity that come with true control.

The question then becomes: what stands between being able to move from levels 2 and 3 to levels 4 and 5 where you are and moving the business numbers leadership tracks?

In this report, we identified two main hurdles:

1. Teams have not yet turned their strategy into something leadership actively backs, rather than simply approves (levels 2-3).
2. Teams have leadership backing, but lack a clear way to demonstrate, in business terms, that learning drove tangible change (levels 4-5)

Neither wall is a failure; they are simply the next obstacles to overcome, and knowing which one you face dictates your next move. That is the central focus of this report.

Read on for the full dataset, sector breakdowns, and case studies. When you're ready to pinpoint your team's standing, take the updated assessment—now featuring new themes on AI adoption and line manager involvement.

— David James

Chief Learning Officer, 360Learning

Methodology and findings at a glance

 The 360Learning L&D Maturity Model asks L&D professionals to self-assess their organization across seven themes, each on a five-level scale:

Learning Strategy — Leadership Alignment — Learner Engagement — Learning Metrics — Learning Needs Identification — SME Collaboration — Training Processes.

The five levels run from:

1. Reactive (Level 1: informal, undefined strategy focused on compliance)
2. Proactive (Level 2: a defined strategy covering one to three core use cases)
3. Impacting (Level 3: an employee-oriented strategy where L&D drives core use cases)
4. Strategic (Level 4: business-aligned, covering core and business use cases)
5. Transformative (Level 5: skills-based, organization-wide, and built for resilience).

This report draws on 1,062 fully completed assessments submitted between February 2025 and July 2026. Of those 1,062 respondents, 399 could be matched to firmographic data. Findings that describe the industry as a whole draw on all 1,062 responses; findings that break results down by sector, size, 360Learning customer status, or seniority draw on the smaller, firmographic-matched group of 399, and are labeled accordingly throughout. All data is self-reported.

One further definition worth pointing out: where this report describes an organization as having "adopted a collaborative learning approach," that is a proxy, not a separate survey question — specifically, it's the 138 of the 399 enriched respondents who are 360Learning customers, and so use collaborative learning in their platform daily.

Next chapter: Part one: The core diagnosis