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The future of L&D? Less content, more context.
Takeaways from our HR Grapevine panel — Skills & Capabilities Mapping: Ensuring L&D Impact in 2026.
47% of organisations say digital transformation and AI is their number one business challenge. So why does L&D so often feel like an order-taker rather than a strategic partner?
That was the opening question when Sarah Steele, Ian Klein and Matt Moule sat down with HR Grapevine - and the conversation that followed was refreshingly honest. Five things stood out.
1.
Nobody gives you a seat at the table. You earn it.
The panel didn't let L&D off the hook. When a stakeholder demands "better leadership training," the easy path is to deliver exactly that — even when training isn't what will fix the problem.
Ian's advice was blunt: do the needs analysis anyway. "Do your own needs analysis if you're not given the opportunity. Show the results — that's how you earn the seat at the table. Next time, they come to you sooner and say I've got a problem, can you help me solve it? — not please do X."
2.
Measure what the business already measures
Forget building the perfect evaluation framework. Ian shared a cautionary tale: a 60-page measurement plan, beautifully designed, every Kirkpatrick level covered — and the client couldn't access any of the internal data needed to prove it.
Matt's alternative: attach learning to metrics that already exist and already matter — retention, grievances, promotions, safety, overtime. And Sarah added the design principle that ties it together:
"What is being measured has got to be designed, and what is being designed has got to be measured." — Sarah Steele
Measurement isn't a bolt-on at the end - it's a decision at the start. The panel's shorthand for what the C-suite actually wants to know: did it raise revenue, cut costs, or reduce risk?
3.
Don't build a course on ChatGPT 4.2
On AI, the panel converged fast: teaching specific tools is a losing game. "AI tools are going to change every five minutes," as Ian put it. "What's more relevant is teaching people how to think about using the tool - whatever tool that is."Including when not to use it: AI can help a manager rehearse a difficult conversation, but nobody should walk into a conversation about someone's job reading from a script.
Matt brought the sobering data: despite billions invested, Gallup's 2026 global workplace research suggests less than 5% of organisations can attach a tangible productivity return to AI. And the second-biggest success factor, after technical integration? Managers - their adoption, their use, and the permission they give their teams. AI value realisation, it turns out, is a management capability problem.
Sarah's design answer: keep AI programmes evergreen and flexible, and anchor them in the human skills that hold no matter what the tools do. One of her clients skipped tool training entirely and ran a roadshow on a single theme: learning how to learn.
4.
The line of the hour: less content, more context
The moment that lit up the chat came from Ian, looking a few years ahead: anyone will soon be able to generate competent generic content in seconds. So what's left?
"L&D's role is going to be less about the content and more about the context. How do you tailor it to be perfect for your audience? How do you make the facilitation so amazing that it's worth having a live experience over reading something on a screen?" — Ian Klein
Sarah made it practical: "The content is the easy piece. What brings training alive is creating the space for learners to put that content into their context — because even within the same department, a manager with a new team and a manager with a ten-year team are living in different worlds." Her new job title, she joked, is content designer and context designer
5.
Managers remain L&D's biggest lever
The panel kept returning to one population. Matt cited research from Harvard, MIT and Stanford suggesting management practices account for around a 30% variation in productivity between companies. Ian called management development "L&D's killer app" - and made it personal: the difference between managers who connected his work to a mission and those who didn't shaped entire chapters of his career.
And the squeezed middle is getting squeezed harder: managers of managers now lead people doing fundamentally different jobs than they themselves once did. Part of the new skill set, Matt argued, is getting comfortable with not knowing.
What's next?
One action for L&D:
Sarah: Get the foundations solid - feedback, decision-making, the human skills that hold when everything else changes.
Ian: Talk to your senior stakeholders directly. Don't read the mission statement — ask them what the must-dos are for the next twelve months, and measure the gap against what you're working on.
Matt: Find one winnable battle. Pick an initiative with a willing stakeholder, tie it to a metric the business already tracks, and build your performance story. Executives talk in numbers.
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