How to Update Your Corporate Learning Strategy for 2025

Companies are spending a metric ton of money on training every year: the corporate learning industry is reportedly worth nearly $400 billion worldwide. But all of that investment can easily go to waste without a smart, strategic approach to back it up.

The working world is changing fast, and organizations are scrambling to keep pace with changing economic forces, and the new technologies emerging every day. Continuous learning is vital to ensure your workforce has the competencies you need, and that career paths develop in line with the wider landscape.

In 2025, the best corporate learning strategies place an emphasis on the following:

• Better measurements to show how L&D helps reach key business objectives
• More scalable programs, without the typical hurdles in creating learning activities and training material
• Increased emphasis on institutional knowledge, and particular on engaging your own subject-matter experts
• Continued reliance on collaborative learning culture to unlock more effective development programs
• Shifting to skills-based approach to corporate training and learning

These are among the most crucial and impactful updates you can make to your employee learning strategy this year. Let’s look at each individually.

1. Measure performance KPIs, not vanity metrics

True L&D success isn’t measured with classic metrics like course completion rates or internal NPS scores. Especially as businesses focus hard on efficiency and the return on investment of all initiatives, learning programs need to prove that they not only tick boxes, but push the company towards its larger goals.

Truly successful L&D programs drive meaningful change in organizations, and ultimately better business performance.

So what are the kinds of business metrics that L&D can directly impact? Here are a few great examples:

• Reduced employee turnover. We know that more engaged employees stay longer, and that L&D has a positive impact on employee engagement. But you need to prove it.
• Identify your highest risk teams and create specific upskilling initiatives for them. If this correlates with better employee retention among those teams, there’s your proof.
• Increased revenue (in specific areas). What if you can show increased revenue in precise areas following a particular training course? That’s a very tangible, precise demonstration of the ROI from L&D.
• It makes sense, then to prioritize new learning programs that directly relate to revenue growth. These could be negotiation role plays for sales teams, or upsell training for customer success teams.
• Skills gaps closed. A skills-based approach is borderline essential these days. As part of this, you should map out organizational skills gaps, and have plans in place to close these.
• Executive buy-in is crucial here. Filling these specific gaps should be a company goal and priority.
• Time to productivity for new hires. Financially, time to productivity for new team members is a cost. So the shorter, the better.
• First define what a truly productive (or fully onboarded) employee looks like in each role. Then create initiatives to reduce the time to get them there.  
• Improved trust of managers. L&D teams are often called upon to upskill managers. But the success metric shouldn’t be courses completed, or managers’ happiness with their lessons.
• Instead, measure the improved feedback from their colleagues and teams. L&D should be able to directly improve the perception—and actual performance—of the company’s leaders.

By tying your efforts to these core organizational goals—rather than more common L&D industry metrics—you create a strategy that proves its own value by driving the business forward.

2. Ensure learning is scalable

Delivering tailored learning to a few handfuls of employees is one thing. But as your company grows to hundreds or even thousands of team members, creating personalized learning paths becomes impractical.

To keep up, companies use generic content libraries and off-the-shelf courses. These are never tailored enough to employees’ specific context, they’re often out of date, and they require employees to be self-motivated.

But you can deliver tailored training to the entire organization without generic content libraries or a massive L&D team. Here are 8 key principles to keep in mind:

1. Align training with business goals. As companies grow, it becomes harder to prove the impact of L&D. Demonstrating direct business value makes corporate learning indispensable.
2. Empower employees with bottom-up learning. Encouraging employees to take charge of their own development fosters engagement and ensures learning remains practical and continuously evolving. When employees help shape training initiatives, they’re more invested in the outcome.
3. Let learners identify their needs. Create open channels for employees to express their learning needs in real time. This makes training more relevant, reduces content overload, and leads to stronger application in daily work.
4. Leverage in-house experts. Instead of relying solely on external training, empower SMEs to contribute through streamlined course creation tools, ensuring relevant, high-impact learning at scale. More on this next.
5. Preserve and share institutional knowledge. Company-specific expertise is a valuable asset—but without a system to capture it, key knowledge disappears when employees leave. Document, store, and distribute institutional insights, and ensure they’re accessible across teams and time zones.
6. Establish a centralized knowledge hub. Avoid knowledge silos by consolidating training resources into a single, accessible platform. You need a “single source of truth,” ensuring employees can quickly find the information they need.
7. Prioritize localization for global teams. Expanding into new regions brings language and cultural differences that impact learning effectiveness. Using an LMS with built-in translation capabilities ensures employees receive high-quality, localized training, helping maintain consistency across global teams.
8. Continuously update and optimize learning content. Training programs should evolve alongside your business. A dynamic approach keeps learning relevant and impactful over time.

For more detail on each of these points, read our guide to scalable learning.

3. Engage subject-matter experts

An often overlooked aspect of both scaling learning and aligning with business goals is tapping into the expertise already present within the organization. Your subject-matter experts (SMEs) hold invaluable knowledge that can enhance learning initiatives and make training more relevant and impactful.

Partnering with SMEs lets L&D teams develop high-quality and deeply engaging learning experiences.

But capturing this institutional knowledge remains a challenge. It’s still too difficult to identify and engage the right individuals effectively.

Our own research has found that, while 92% of employees report having valuable knowledge to share, only 60% have been asked to contribute. And just 25% have actively collaborated with L&D teams to create learning content. There’s a disconnect here.

Integrating SMEs into corporate learning has three distinct advantages:

1. Contextual expertise – SMEs understand the company’s unique challenges, tools, and workflows.
2. Credibility and trust – Because SMEs work directly with teams, their insights carry weight, making learning materials more impactful.
3. Cost efficiency – When their time is managed well and their contributions are valued, SMEs can provide expert input without additional external costs.

However, it’s crucial to engage SMEs wisely. They are not instructional designers or content creators by trade, and expecting them to build training from the ground up is unrealistic.

Instead, L&D teams should streamline the process for them—leveraging AI-powered authoring tools to simplify course development, removing unnecessary bottlenecks, and guiding them through structured frameworks.

Most importantly, recognize and appreciate SMEs for their contributions. Ensure that their participation doesn’t negatively affect their primary responsibilities. By protecting their core job functions while valuing their input, organizations can build a sustainable model for SME collaboration—ultimately enhancing the effectiveness of corporate learning.

Related: How Spendesk Overhauled Their Onboarding by Turning Subject-Matter Experts Into Content Creators

4. Increase collaborative learning opportunities

Collaborative Learning—a learning methodology based on peer interaction and knowledge sharing—is more effective than old-school, top-down learning techniques that don’t hold learners’ attention.

When employees have opportunities to learn collaboratively, they’re more likely to be engaged. Based on our own customer data, learners find courses that have internal collaboration during the creation process to be twice as useful.

The conversations could be anything from co-authors strategizing on course content, and/or reviewers giving feedback to the authors of the course.

You can incorporate Collaborative Learning into your learning strategy in several ways:

• Implement peer-to-peer feedback loops, which encourage a culture of collaboration.
• Use Collaborative Learning software that gives employees the ability to create, shared, and iterate on course content. (The right learning management system makes a huge difference.)
• Let employees establish their own priorities based on their specific learning needs and goals.
• Incorporate social learning principles, borrowing from the social media platforms employees use daily.

Most importantly, use formats which encourage learners to share their progress and to learn from one another along the way. This builds natural mentorships between employees, breeds leadership development, and fosters a work environment where learning is part of the core fabric.

5. Take a skills-based approach

The workplace is undergoing a profound transformation, with skills emerging as the currency of success. As industries evolve and technological advancements accelerate, organizations must prioritize upskilling and reskilling to stay competitive, adaptable, and future-proof.

This shift places learning and development at the heart of business strategy. L&D leaders must move beyond traditional role-based training and embrace a skills-first mindset—one that equips employees with the capabilities they need not just for today’s challenges, but for long-term success.

Staying relevant isn’t just about filling immediate gaps; it’s about anticipating the future. Adaptability is paramount. Organizations that proactively analyze trends, assess workforce capabilities, and align learning initiatives with business goals gain a distinct competitive edge.

A well-crafted skills strategy turns L&D into a catalyst for transformation. Instead of simply delivering training content, learning teams must drive meaningful workforce evolution—ensuring employees develop the expertise required to propel the company forward.

The businesses that thrive will be those that recognize employee skills development as a strategic priority, not a secondary concern. The real question isn’t whether to invest in new skills—it’s whether any company can afford not to.

Corporate learning strategy needs to meet the moment

If there’s one recent trend to keep front of mind, it’s the need for L&D programs to impact organizational goals and deliver real business results. Gone are the days of professional development and employee training as learning objectives in themselves.

Today, companies depend on L&D teams to enhance employee performance and deliver learning journeys that provide whatever the business needs. Not as an HR function or a “nice to have,” but because the business can’t thrive without you.

To achieve this, your approach should be:

• Data-driven, based on key business objectives
• Scalable and flexible to suit individual training needs
• Led by internal subject-matter experts
• Collaborative, and
• Skills-based, with the goal of closing critical skills gaps

With these keys in mind, you can build a truly effective learning and development strategy.