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Workplace Learning Report | 2025
The rise of career champions
The answer to the skills crisis hides in plain sight.
In a world of constant flux, organisations can only be as adaptable as their people and their skills. Today, over half of learning and talent development professionals in the United Kingdom see a skills crisis, with 57% agreeing, “My executives are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to execute our business strategy.”
To address this gap, learning is critical—but new LinkedIn data says there’s much more to it. Learning combined with career development (leadership training, coaching, internal mobility, and more) accelerates the flow of critical skills to keep pace with business needs.
But why is career development—a classic idea with new relevance—so powerful for adaptability and growth? Consider that, globally, career progress is people’s No.1 motivation to learn and when employees don’t move ahead, they leave and take their skills elsewhere. By investing in career development, employers in the UK can counteract the anxiety that comes with rapid change by building loyalty, energy, and innovation for the next era of work. In short, great companies are built on great careers.
Read on for insights and advice to put career-driven learning into action.
Career development champions
Organisations that prioritise career development outpace others on key indicators of business success.
In terms of metrics like internal mobility rate and new skills delivered for the business, what are organisations that embrace career development gaining over those that do not? To help answer this question, LinkedIn used survey responses to identify where organisations rank on a career development maturity curve, with the most mature qualifying as “career development champions.”
The upshot: only 33% of organisations in the UK fall into the career development champions category with robust programmes that yield business results. Globally, 31% have career development programmes with limited adoption, and 33% have no initiatives or are just getting started.
Globally, what sets career development champions apart?
How do career development champions outpace others in indicators of business success?
Career development champions outperform non-champions on a range of positive indicators. They’re more confident in their ability to be profitable and to attract and retain talent. Significantly, career development champions around the world are better positioned to reap the benefits of generative AI (GAI) transformation; 51% describe their organisation as a frontrunner in GAI adoption (at the “leading” or “accelerating” stages), compared to 36% of those with weaker career development programmes. Stated another way, career development champions are 42% more likely to be frontrunners in GAI adoption compared to all others.
Globally, mature career development initiatives correlate with positive outlook for profitability, confidence to attract and retain talent, and GAI adoption.
The data in this report comes from three primary sources: interviews with global talent leaders; the annual Workplace Learning survey; and studies of LinkedIn platform data derived from 1 billion members, 14 million jobs, and 5 million profile updates per minute. Read full methodology here
Leading perspectives
“The companies that outlearn other companies will outperform them.”
Vidya Krishnan
Chief Learning Officer at Ericsson
“AI adoption and career development are a unified strategy for agility.”
Naphtali Bryant
Talent Development Course Author at LinkedIn Learning
"Career development is an enabler to increase employee engagement and retention by connecting to individual motivation."
Sean White
Senior Executive Vice President Learning & Development, Citco
"Our ability to compete and thrive depends on the skills, agility, and motivation of our workforce. By empowering employees with the tools and opportunities they need to grow, we align their personal aspirations with the organisation’s goals, creating a win scenario for all. "
Wai Bin Lai
CCO at The Learning Performance Institute
Data gathered from the LinkedIn platform also shows positive outcomes for organisations that prioritise career development. For this analysis, LinkedIn created a Career Development Index that scored organisations on four indicators of career support: commitments on the organisation’s company page; keywords in job postings; prevalence of leadership development skills within the employee base; and high levels of internal mobility.
Based on their scores, companies were split into five groups of equal size, called quintiles. The top group with the highest scores was compared to the bottom group to see how their results differed. Compared to those who score low, global organisations with strong index scores are more likely to see three positive outcomes:
• More employees who engage with learning—crucial for maintaining a flow of business-relevant skills.
• Higher rate of promotions—an indicator that more employees are achieving impactful job performance.
• Higher rate of promotions into positions of management and leadership—signifying a healthy pipeline of people who have institutional knowledge and strategic acumen.
Organisations scoring high on the Career Development Index have higher rates of learner engagement and job promotions.
Of course, promotions are not the only way to help employees feel a sense of career progress. Upskilling, coaching, and internal role changes help people feel valued, engaged, and more likely to stay with their organisation.
"Our employees are the most valuable assets our company has. When we invest in their professional development and skills, they perform well, feel valued, trust our company and stay with us". says Denise Bahro, Digital Learning Consultant at TUI Musement
of learning and development (L&D) pros in the UK agree continuous learning is more important than ever for career success.
To better understand how employee turnover drains key skills from an organisation, an additional analysis of LinkedIn platform data identified the skills most likely to show a net depletion at companies with more than 50 hires and 50 departures. The most at-risk skill worldwide? Business strategy—the ability to set goals and adjust to changing market forces.
Other at-risk skills include strategic planning, sales management, and project planning. All are hard-to-replace skills that require critical thinking, working with uncertainty, and institutional knowledge.
The top 10 skills lost to attrition are the most valuable to the company and the hardest to replace globally.
of organisations in the UK are concerned about employee retention.
In order to improve their retention rates, 61% of UK organisations provide employees with learning opportunities, while wellness programmes and benefits closely follow at 60%.
Capitalising on GAI
Future-facing organisations are embracing GAI adoption and career development as “a unified strategy for agility”.
“AI has the potential to enhance the way we work and offer development as talent development professionals”, says Miranda Kofoed Talent Performance Lead at Lowell. “We are leaning into ways that can help us curate and generate content at speed and leverage AI features that allow our workforce to access content/knowledge and practise core skills in seconds.”
Taking a more detailed look at the survey data, the research looks at four levels of GAI upskilling: not yet started, emerging, accelerating, and leading. Career development champions outpace non-champions at both the accelerating and leading levels of GAI adoption, indicating the strong relationship between career support and future-facing upskilling.
The state of GAI adoption: Globally, career development champions show significant adoption compared to others.
Many career development champions view GAI as a competitive advantage that they can scale across their organisations—upskilling employees on a wide range of roles and levels of proficiency. For example, administrative assistants benefit from introductory GAI fluency while engineers require highly technical skills to build and deploy AI-based systems.
And many see that taking steps to future-proof technology should go hand-in-hand with developing people. Compared to non-champions, career development champions around the globe are 32% percent more likely to be deploying GAI training programmes this year, and 88% more likely to offer career-enhancing gig opportunities or project-based learning. Even though champions already offer tangible career support for employees, they are 33% more likely to agree that career development is more of a priority this year.
So what are the most common best practices for career-building initiatives? In-house training comes out on top, with 74% of organisations in the UK offering it.
The most common career development practices in the UK are in-house training programmes and leadership training.
Career development stories
Sean White on career development at Citco
Broad talent reviews enhance employee impact. Our Future Leader Pathway for first-level managers supports internal mobility and growth.
Jay Shankar on breaking career barriers at Amazon
Tuition reimbursement supports employee aspirations while closing skills gaps around the globe.
Tips for L&D success
Five talent foundations can accelerate career-driven learning.
What’s standing in the way of a leap forward in career development? It seems that managers, employees, and talent teams are all stretched too thin to go beyond daily work and make progress for their teams, themselves, and their organisations.
Asked to choose the top three barriers standing in the way of career development, respondents in the UK say that a lack of time and resources is a strong pain point: 47% say managers lack proper support; 41% say employees lack support; and 33% say talent teams themselves lack support.
But only 8% of survey respondents in the UK cite, “leadership doesn’t value career development” as one of their top three barriers. While it appears that most leadership teams are not standing in the way of career development, they aren’t doing enough to address the systemic challenges to allow managers, employees, and talent teams to properly prioritise it.
Talent leaders must bring this story to life for the C-suite and articulate what’s needed to drive bottom-line results. To help this conversation, here are five talent strategy foundations that organisations can adopt to create business value with career development and continuous learning.
Build the right skills, faster
It’s a simple idea—put the right people, with the right skills, in the right jobs, at the right time. But most talent leaders know that building an agile skills ecosystem is easier said than done.
Generative artificial intelligence is here to help. While GAI is revolutionising in-demand skills, it’s also delivering dynamic, on-demand, and personalised learning technology to help organisations keep up. Many L&D pros in the UK are leaning in to use GAI for their programmes, with 78% exploring, experimenting, or integrating it into their work.
Other talent development practices include tracking the skills-gap data, creating skills-based career paths, collaborating with executives and talent colleagues, and using skills assessments. Not surprisingly, agile practices are more common for career development champions Check out the Skills Playbook for more tips and strategies.
Globally, skills-based talent strategies are more prevalent for career development champions and include greater collaboration with executives and cross-functional HR teams.
Accelerating skill building through closer collaboration
We know that for some of our colleagues navigating their career can feel like a minefield. We have initiated an on-demand self-led Career Development programme, to help our colleagues create a career development plan and navigate their career journey themselves. In this programme, we share practical tips and tools to help them develop their self-awareness, how they can approach feedback and how they can own and stick to their career plan. The key message emphasised throughout the programme is that colleagues are in the driver’s seat with their career.
Miranda Kofoed
Talent Performance Lead, Lowell
Help people—and skills—move more easily.
Focusing on internal mobility helps build an agile workforce that can apply transferable skills and cross-functional knowledge across the organisation. Globally, around half of both career development champions (55%) and all other survey respondents (48%) see internal mobility as a higher priority in the year ahead.
Globally, more than half of career development champions see internal mobility as a rising priority.
How can more organisations kick-start internal mobility? Collaboration is key.
As a whole, career development champions worldwide already collaborate more often with other HR partners; 47% say they’re working more closely with talent acquisition this year compared with 36% for non-champions, and 55% of champions collaborate with talent management compared with 45% of non-champions.
Only 11% of career development champions in EMEA have a dedicated internal mobility leader. And even when such a leader is present, internal mobility still requires significant cross-functional work. It pays to begin by convening partners, including talent acquisition and talent management, to align on goals and share their perspective and expertise. Check out the Internal Mobility Playbook for models, tips, and assessments.
Creating specific training programmes for career advancement
"At Infineon, we've reimagined career development with four distinct pathways. Our Management Career focuses on organizational leadership, the Technical Ladder caters to R&D experts, the Project Management Career is tailored for our project managers, and the Individual Contributor Career recognizes employees who make valuable contributions through their specialized expertise. This approach broadens the concept of 'career' and aligns it more closely with individual interests and strengths. Many companies traditionally equate career growth with leadership roles, sometimes turning their best technical experts into reluctant managers. Our four-path model has been well-received, enabling personalized and tailored growth opportunities, even within a large corporation."
Jessica Richter
Vice President, Global Head of Talent Development at Infineon
Measure business impact.
Learning and talent development leaders struggle to articulate the value of their work, but the stakes are more important than ever before. Now is the time to define and gather metrics that demonstrate how investments in career development and skill-building support the organisation’s highest objectives: think productivity and profits.
Employee engagement and retention are currently the most common ways to measure the impact of career development. But there’s an opportunity to aim higher. "Tracking and connecting learning to business outcomes and sharing this data transparently is crucial to demonstrate value and reinforces the talent development function's role”, says Ed Monk, CEO of The Learning Performance Institute. Get more advice from the Measuring ROI Playbook
Employee engagement and retention are the most common ways to measure the business impact of career development in EMEA.
Raising the bar for sales performance outcomes
Visa is evolving rapidly. Our sales team used to focus on landing one value proposition—now we have more than 200. To build proficiency across Visa’s range of products, we have embedded Highspot’s AI-powered training and coaching capabilities into a broader Visa product knowledge and solutions learning programme. Now sales teammates can learn about the new product/solution value proposition and practice pitches in a safe space, receiving automated feedback without fear of judgment. This new approach and tool has resulted in a 78% increase in confidence with our sellers to pitch Visa products, and 83% of leaders saw value in their sellers leveraging the programme and tool to practice their pitches.
Jeremy Broome
Global Head of Talent at Visa
Empower managers to support employee careers.
The best managers can also claim the title of career development champion. They steer their people to skill-building opportunities, experiences, and connections that allow them to succeed and lead anywhere. Great managers share their employees’ accomplishments with others and connect them to people who can help advance their careers.
Unfortunately, employees in EMEA have seen significantly less support from their manager year over year: only 11% say their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months, a decline of five percentage points from 2024.
Dramatic drops in manager support for their teams point to widespread drains on manager time. Organisations must provide systems of empowerment to help managers regain their momentum and impact, such as dedicated training and easy-to-use resources. Recognition helps too. Organisations must shine a spotlight on managers who embrace career-building and internal mobility.
The state of managers: Within EMEA, mentors focused on employees’ career development are losing steam when it comes to delivering support.
Percentage of employees who say their manager provided forms of learning and career support.
Unlocking managers’ potential as career coaches
People managers at many companies are overwhelmed—juggling team leadership, employee well-being, and their full-time roles. At The Coca-Cola Company, we empathise with this challenge and are evolving how we select, prepare, and support our leaders. We've implemented rigorous leadership assessments to select the right people for leadership roles upfront, and provide cohort-based development and transparent upward feedback through our performance enablement practice. This approach helps set our people managers up for success by enabling them to better coach, remove roadblocks, and align priorities around the work that matters most. Over the past three years, we've seen significant improvements in how our managers and senior leadership are rated by our people, along with overall satisfaction working at Coca-Cola.
Tapaswee Chandele
Senior Vice President of Global Talent, Development & HR System Partnerships at
The Coca-Cola Company
Inspire individual career growth
No organisation can become a true career development champion without this essential ingredient: Giving people a sense of purpose. In fact, 82% of employees in EMEA agree that, “Learning adds purpose to my work.”
Career development flourishes when employees feel in control of their careers and are inspired to build a better future. Organisations can offer tools and support systems that help employees identify their unique strengths, set career goals, pursue skill-building, and access internal mobility opportunities.
The payoff: A workforce motivated to learn new skills — and an organisation ready to adapt and thrive today and tomorrow.
Employees in EMEA see increasing value in learning for adaptability in times of change.
of L&D pros in the UK say human skills are increasingly important.
Personalising learning to drive continuous growth
To respond to rapid changes and talent shortages, we reimagined our approach to learning and growth. We created MyGrowth, a people-centred approach that brings together scalable offerings and engaging experiences in the areas of self-reflection, learning and career, connected through continuous dialogues called Growth Talks. With MyGrowth, we are supporting our people to stay relevant and resilient. In addition to 180,000 available learning offerings, MyGrowth entails upskilling and reskilling through My Skills. This powerful application enables skill assessments, skill gap analysis, and individual skill-based learning recommendations. With MyGrowth, over 254,000 Siemens people are embracing lifelong learning and cultivating a growth mindset.
Jenny Lin
Global Head of Learning and Growth at Siemens
Go deeper with playbooks
Turn this year’s Workplace Learning Report insights into action with LinkedIn data, frameworks, and advice from 20 Talent Development leaders and experts.
Unlocked Courses
Access unlocked courses that are recommended to help you succeed in 2025, covering five key skills: Critical Thinking, Relationship Building, Mentoring, Analytics, and People Management.
Read methodology and acknowledgments
Survey data
The LinkedIn Learning 2025 Workplace Learning Report surveyed 937 L&D and HR professionals with L&D responsibilities who have some influence on budget decisions and 679 learners. Surveyed geographies include: North America (United States, Canada); South America (Brazil); Asia-Pacific (Australia, New Zealand, India, Japan, Cambodia, Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Myanmar, Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong); and Europe (United Kingdom, Ireland, Belgium, Netherlands, Luxembourg, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Iceland, Denmark, France, Germany, Austria).
LinkedIn platform insights
All data reflects aggregated LinkedIn member activity as of September 2024. Behavioral insights for this report were derived from the billions of data points generated by 1 billion members, 14 million jobs, and 5 million profile updates per minute. Specific analyses:
Career Development Index
To determine whether companies have a stronger or weaker Career Development Index, LinkedIn created a tool that assigned more points to companies demonstrating these components of career development index and fewer points to companies not demonstrating as many components of career development index:
- Career growth: We defined career growth as any point at which an employee took a new position at the same company in the last 12 months and calculated the proportion of all transitions that occurred internally.
- Leadership skills development: We identified the proportion of employees that have added at least one of 55 leadership skills to their profile while they were employed in a position at the company in the last 12 months.
- LinkedIn career commitment: We flagged companies that have added at least one commitment with “Career Growth and Learning” on their LinkedIn Career page for promoting career growth.
- Career-oriented job posts: We quantified the number of LinkedIn Job Posts from a company that mention keywords such as “career growth,” “professional development,” and “promotion” across three major languages (English, French, German).
After developing the career development index, companies were split into five groups of equal size, called quintiles, based on increasing values of the index. We then compared the top group, with the highest career development index, to the bottom group, with the lowest, to see how their outcomes differed. The outcomes are defined as follows:
- Overall promotion rate: We considered all internal promotions that occurred in the last 12 months by the company and calculated the percentage of promotions that took place.
- Leadership promotion rate: We considered all internal promotions that occurred in the last 12 months by the company and calculated the percentage of leadership promotions that took place (i.e. member was promoted to a manager role or higher).
- Number of learners: We calculated the total number of learners that have engaged with LinkedIn Learning content in the last 12 months.
- Investment in L&D: As per the Executive Confidence Survey, executives were asked to respond if their own company “In the next 6 months, plans to increase, make no change, or decrease financial investments in L&D.” The proportion of companies that responded with “Increase” was calculated.
Loss of Critical Skills Due to Employee Turnover
The skills explicitly added by employees were identified and the number of hires and departures in a company in the last 12 months were calculated for a given skill. The total departures by total hires for a given skill was calculated as the skill-loss ratio in a company. Finally, the median skill loss ratio across all the companies was calculated for a given skill to identify the loss of critical skills.
Fastest Growing Skills
The skills explicitly added by L&D professionals are identified, and the skills that have seen the largest growth among L&D professionals from September 2023 to September 2024 are classified as Fastest Growing Skills.
Acknowledgments
This report was informed by insightful contributions from learning leaders around the world, to whom we owe our sincere thanks, including:
Wai Bin Lai at The Learning Performance Institute
Vidya Krishnan at Ericsson
Naphtali Bryant at RAC Leadership
Sean White at Citco
Denise Bahro at TUI Musement
Miranda Kofoed at Lowell
Jay Shankar at Amazon
Jessica Richter at Infineon
Jeremy Broome at Visa
Tapaswee Chandele at The Coca-Cola Company
Jenny Lin at Siemens
LinkedIn Platform Insights
Survey Data
Editorial and production
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