Future of Corporate Training: 5 Key Training Trends for 2025

The role of the learning and development (L&D) department is at a critical juncture. With the rapid pace of technological advancement and the evolving nature of job roles, addressing skills gaps has become more urgent. Failure to adapt corporate training strategies leaves companies ill-equipped in today’s ultra competitive landscape.

The good news is that c-suites are finally recognizing the value of L&D. A report by the World Economic Forum reveals over 86% of companies intend to increase adoption of frontier technologies like AI to aid corporate training in the next 5 years. 

What is corporate training?

Corporate training is used to develop employee skills, knowledge, and performance in alignment with organizational goals. Usually led by learning and development professionals in L&D teams, it ensures that employees continue developing throughout their time with your company. Corporate training also helps you build stronger teams through a culture of learning, and ultimately should lead to better performance across the company.

Types of corporate training

There are virtually endless forms of corporate training to use in your organization. Here are just five examples of corporate training programs:

1. Employee onboarding: The first few months in a new role are critical. Good training programs help new employees familiarize themselves with company policies, culture, processes, and expectations.

2. Leadership and management training: New managers often lack the experience and confidence to deal with certain situations. And even seasoned leaders can use a refresher. Training programs may focus on leadership skills, decision-making, strategic thinking, team management, conflict resolution, and emotional intelligence.

3. Technical or job-specific training: Some role-specific training may be required to enhance technical skills. This could include industry-specific software, machinery operation, programming, engineering, or other specialized knowledge.

4. Compliance training: Depending on your industry, this one may not be optional. Compliance training ensures adherence to legal, regulatory, and organizational policies. These may include workplace safety (OSHA), data protection (GDPR), anti-corruption (FCPA), and industry-specific regulations.

5. Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) training: The need and desire for DEI training has grown in recent years, to build awareness and promote inclusivity within the workplace. Topics generally include bias recognition, cultural competence, inclusive leadership, and fostering respectful work environments.

Why is corporate training important?

Corporate training is more critical than ever. Changes in technology and the shift to remote work from the COVID pandemic have made continuous learning and upskilling essential. Companies are investing heavily in corporate training programs to make sure their employees keep up.

Furthermore, a Linkedin Learning report revealed that 94% of employees would stay longer in a company if it invested in their learning and development. This highlights the crucial role of corporate training in employee engagement and retention.

5 trends shaping the future of corporate training

We’ve identified three of the biggest work and learning trends that are shaping the future of corporate training. Here’s how the landscape is evolving and what you need to do to make sure your corporate training programs stay useful and relevant.

1. Renewed emphasis on closing skills gaps

45% of CEOs believe their company will not be viable in ten years if it stays on its current path. While they’re generally optimistic about global economic growth, CEOs are concerned about long-term viability. 

Leaders see the business landscape changing, and many are worried that they don’t have the right skills and expertise in house to keep up. Corporate training must adapt by identifying, assessing, and closing skill gaps inside your company. The demand for new and evolving skills means that learning needs must be continuously identified and addressed.

Automation and AI are good examples. According to McKinsey 65% of companies worldwide use AI “regularly” in at least one business function. And though some are learning quickly, there’s a glaring knowledge gap between the demands of this new technology and the capabilities of the existing workforce. 

AI is a particularly fresh example, but skills gaps are a serious issue. In one survey of UK executives, 84% stated that “the availability of key skills [is] a threat to their organisation’s growth prospects.”

As a result, L&D departments are feeling the pressure to develop corporate training programs to upskill or reskill large numbers of people quickly. There’s a clear business imperative to identify skills gaps and close them efficiently.

It’s also a hiring advantage. Opportunities for professional development within a company have become a big priority for jobseekers, and a reliable retention driver for organizations. Employees are eager to learn new skills, particularly around analytics, AI, and automation in office work environments. Develop corporate training programs and give them the tools they need to do this and build a stronger learning culture to appeal to potential candidates.

L&Ds have known the value of skills-based learning for years. But now senior leaders are paying attention, and learning professionals should accentuate skills in corporate development programs.

The average shelf life of most learning content is less than five years, and that window continues to shorten. With technology changing quickly, sometimes from month to month, you will need to review and update corporate training materials frequently. A collaborative learning platform like 360Learning makes it easy for L&D departments to involve internal subject-matter experts in training content creation and optimization, by allowing SMEs to co-author and contribute to course materials.

2. Using business performance to measure L&D ROI

The idea of proving ROI has long been a touchy subject for L&D leaders. Translating the clear value of great training programs to senior executives can be difficult, which puts these programs at risk during budget cuts. 

Now, companies are increasingly relying on L&D departments to play an important role in talent acquisition, development, and employee retention. These are core business needs, and proving your program’s impact on hiring or retention is a language that executives understand and appreciate. 

L&Ds must move away from simple vanity metrics—course completion rates and employee NPS scores—and show the connection between training courses and essential business KPIs. According to LinkedIn Learning, “aligning learning programs to business goals” is the number one aim for L&Ds heading into 2025.

These could include: 

• Increased retention rates
• Better closing rates for sales teams, and higher average deal sizes
• Skills gaps closed at the company and individual level
• Faster time to productivity for new hires
• Compliance certificates achieved, and overall company compliance levels

Of course, each of these must be linked to a specific training program. So start each course planning process from a clear business need: “How can we keep employees for longer?” “How can we coach salespeople to negotiate larger deals?”

Build the courses that address those specific challenges, and then tell a clear success story in your reports. Show how training employees improves employee performance and goal attainment.

The return on investment becomes obvious and tangible as a result.

3. Prioritizing remote learning for hybrid teams

Remote work is certainly not a new trend. In fact, after a major peak in 2020-21 (Covid, obviously), we’ve reached a sort of stasis in the remote vs in-office discourse. Each company has its own policy, and experts can agree to disagree on whether one model is better than the other.

But no matter what your particular policy is, your training programs should still be designed and delivered with remote employees in mind. Modern work culture has so much flexibility and individuality built in, you simply can’t assume that 100% of learners will be present for in-person training every time.

As a practical matter, assume that at least one learner will be in another location or taking the course asynchronously from the rest.

As companies increasingly move towards total or partial remote work, online learning programs are becoming more essential as part of a company’s corporate training plan. Online training is not only cheaper and easier to organize than in-person training sessions, but it also allows employees to learn at their own pace, from anywhere. 

Learning management systems like 360Learning makes it much easier to track individual employees' progress, measure course completion rates, and prove ROI on training initiatives.

Updating corporate training for remote work

Look for learning solutions and corporate training programs that fit into employees’ daily lives, like micro-learning sessions, mobile learning, and collaborative learning that enables colleagues to engage asynchronously in courses.

Don’t get bogged down in logistics or the pressure to create perfect course materials. While these things are important, what matters more is increasing learning accessibility inside your company.

How to do this is actually relatively simple: plan and design training with remote learners in mind. You’ll need good communication tools like Slack, Zoom, Teams, and an LMS designed for maximum adaptability.

Make sure training can take place anytime, anywhere, with videos, quizzes, and other interactive extras to make learning engaging even through a computer screen.

4. Shift away from top-down corporate training

Traditional top-down management and learning models no longer meet employees’ needs. In the past, leadership and managers dictated when and what employees learned. L&D determined learning needs from managers, created training, and shared them with employees whose only job was to absorb the training.

This was a slow, static process and not the most effective for learner engagement, content quality, or measurable business impact.

Passive, boring learning doesn’t cut it. Corporate training experiences must be engaging, dynamic, and empowering for individuals to contribute meaningfully. And just as crucially, they should reflect what employees actually want and need to learn.

Compare all this with a bottom-up, collaborative learning approach, where everyone at the company plays a role in identifying key learning needs and contributing to course creation. The learning process is decentralized and democratized. Anyone can declare a learning need, volunteer to create a course, or submit feedback on existing corporate training content.

This makes training more relevant and easier to produce. Internal subject-matter experts can also easily share institutional knowledge, leading to a decrease in brain drain and information silos.

Demographics play a huge role in this organizational shift. Millennials and Gen Z employees are beginning to dominate the workforce, and they prefer a different learning style than their predecessors. These workers prefer more collaborative work environments and self-directed learning paths. LinkedIn Learning’s 2020 Workplace Learning Report shows that 67% of Gen Z employees want corporate training experiences that are social and collaborative.

360Learning’s platform is built around this idea of collaborative learning. Inside the 360Learning platform, users declare their own training needs, teammates can co-author courses together, and all feedback is housed in one place.  

Making corporate training collaborative

Internally at 360Learning, we’ve fully embraced this model, not just in our learning philosophy but also in our management style. Instead of a top-down management model, we adopted a culture of what we call Convexity, which combines low authority with high individual accountability. We focus on transparency, constant iteration, and accountability via metric tracking. Access to information means everyone has the power to make decisions.

Similarly, bottom-up corporate training allows individuals to play a more proactive role in their training journey. In this model, the role of L&D shifts from executors of content to facilitators. We’ve found that among companies that use our software, non-L&D team members create 85% of the courses.

5. Authoring new courses faster with AI

No trends piece for 2025 would be complete without a discussion of artificial intelligence. And while AI has many L&D use cases, course authoring is perhaps the most exciting.

Every L&D professional knows how long the time to launch new programs can be. Especially when you’re working with subject-matter experts (SMEs)—your company’s biggest assets—it can be hard to find the time to create, review, and publish learning material.

This is obviously painful for L&Ds—you can spend six months to launch what should be a two-week project. Worse still, the material can easily become outdated in that time, or the company’s priorities can change. And whatever enthusiasm there was from stakeholders and learners at the beginning of the year dissipates as the time passes.

So fast authoring is a major plus. And AI is just the tool for the job.

Here’s how it can help:

1. Pull key facts and figures from static documents and present them as engaging course content.
2. Act as the copilot to your SMEs, giving them ideas and pedagogical methods to make their lessons more compelling and actionable.
3. Take simple bullet points or brief ideas and build courses with exercises, tests, and interactive elements.
4. Identify skills gaps and suggest new topics to write courses for.
5. Pull material from your existing library or external sources as further reading.

And those are just five sample benefits related specifically to authoring!

Learning and development is, unfortunately, time consuming and often hard to scale. Good AI tools help to automate a huge amount of the grunt work, and also provide real insights and suggestions to improve courses.

This lets you launch courses in record time, update whenever content becomes stale, and get more from busy SMEs.

The future of corporate training

Just as companies everywhere are focusing on efficiency, impact, and return on investment, so too are learning and development programs. Workplace learning is rightly being seen increasingly as a strategic asset, with effective training programs bringing real business results.

Career development is still valuable, as are soft skills, decision-making, and other classic types of corporate training. But the more you can show a direct correlation between L&D programs and an improved bottom line, the more valuable your work becomes.

Specifically for 2025, we’ll see additional investment in:

• Employee skill development and upskilling
• Remote learning and a continued preference for online courses
• AI-assisted authoring and more automation throughout courses
• Bottom-up needs analysis and collaborative learning

None of these ideas are new, but all are particularly en vogue in 2025.

And L&D professionals will continue their transition from content creators to facilitators. Today’s L&D teams are focused on creating learning cultures within their organizations and empowering employees to take charge of their own learning. That means more reliance on subject-matter experts as authors, and more planning and reporting responsibilities for L&Ds.

L&D professionals must be ready to claim their place as strategic leaders, using corporate training to ultimate effect.