It’s been a decade since we shared this post that unpacked the challenges of training a global workforce. Back then, we focused on three essentials: scale, consistency, and cultural relevance. And, for good reason, those fundamentals still matter. But if we’ve learned anything in the last ten years, it’s that what sits around them has changed dramatically.
Organisations today are operating in far more volatile, hybrid, and high-pressure environments. And for learning teams, that’s redefined the brief entirely.
What’s stayed - for good reason.
Things we got right back then that still matter today:
- Centralised delivery can make the difference when you want cohesion across borders, brands, and business units.
- Modular, flexible and scalable content is still the smartest way to adapt across regions and roles without reinventing the wheel.
- Real localisation (not just swapping out idioms) still makes or breaks engagement.
- And yes, templates and frameworks are still your friends when you need scale without sacrificing quality.
The differentiators of yesterday have now become the fundamentals and still don’t reflect the whole picture today.
The 2025 learning landscape: more pressure, more possibilities.
Fast forward to today, and the world of work is almost unrecognisable. Talent shortages continue, hybrid teams, shifting values, heightened demands around equity and wellbeing. It’s a lot. L&D teams are being asked to do far more than "deliver learning." They’re being asked to enable transformation. Sustainably. Globally. At pace. And frequently lack the capability, capacity, and priority to do any of that meaningfully.
The brief has stretched from capability building and knowledge transfer to culture shaping and performance enablement. And, as these changes are felt across the industry, learning is expected to behave less as a service function and more as a lever for competitive advantage.
Ultimately, this shift has changed not just what we design but why we design in the first place.
AI didn’t see that coming.
Back in 2015, we weren’t talking about generative AI. Now you can’t move for it.
Yes, it’s enabling faster translation, more personalised pathways, and smarter content surfacing. The tools are growing more capable by the week. But amid all the excitement, it’s worth remembering: AI is just that: a tool.
Chasing shiny tech without fixing the fundamentals underneath won’t help progress any meaningful change or transformation within your organisation. You can’t automate your way out of misaligned strategy, broken trust, or unclear expectations. These are human problems at their core - and bringing in new tech won’t help to solve them.
As one learner put it to me in a recent focus group:
“Maybe some people are ok with AI as a primary tool during onboarding, but not me. You didn’t hire me to interact with an app, if I’m only worth a response from a robot, why am I even here? Don’t expect much from me.”
It’s an important reminder that learning still happens between people, not just prompts, and over indexing on that can cause its own set of challenges related to employee communications, critical thinking, and care.
The real challenge: strategic capability building.
In our work with global organisations, the questions that keep coming up are less about platforms; they’re about performance:
- How do we build a workforce that thrives through uncertainty and change?
- How do we enable leadership and collaboration across cultures, time zones, and ways of working?
- How do we move from learning that looks good on paper to learning that shows up in practice?
These are big, strategic challenges, so they need big-picture thinking. Learning needs to be aligned even more closely to business goals, making sure every initiative directly connects to what the organisation is trying to achieve. Increasingly, designing for in in-the-flow enablement is not optional, and learning experiences should be meeting people where they work rather than pulling them away for training. And crucially, organisations need to be helping their people to build the internal muscle to adapt and sustain change, because transformation isn't a one-time event anymore. That's the work that truly matters. We're moving away from simply deploying courses toward developing entire capability ecosystems that evolve with the business.
What strategic partnership looks like now.
People enablement is broader than ever, and the scrutiny is sharper too: budgets are tighter, expectations are higher, and demonstrable results are non-negotiable. And all of these mean we’re seeing less demand for delivering content and far more around solving complex, human challenges.
Organisations want measurement strategies that go way beyond smile sheets and link to real business outcomes. They need managers and leaders who genuinely enable learning and support their teams through complex change, not just talk about it. And they're looking for learning cultures that are baked into transformation from the start, not bolted on as an afterthought when someone realises they forgot about the people side of change. All of this is about building behaviours, cultures, and capabilities that hold up under pressure and drives performance over time.
Looking forward, still learning.
A lot has changed since we wrote about global learning in 2015: the tech has shifted dramatically and the contexts both learners and organisations find themselves in are tougher. But the core challenge is still human: how do we help people grow, lead, and perform in complex, changing environments?
The next decade will demand even more from L&D. More creativity. More strategic clarity. Whatever comes next — emerging tech, new work models, global shake-ups, one thing won’t change: the need to invest in people, with intention.
We’re excited to keep learning and to help shape what comes next.