Scott Rose is General Manager of Impact UK
What defined 2025 - and where learning leaders go next
In this blog, Scott Rose shares his insights into what made 2025 the year of uncertainty and what learning and development leaders are focusing on in 2026.
Whether it’s the ‘rise of AI’, operating in the ‘new normal’, or navigating the ‘polycrisis’ of global conflict, climate change and economic instability, 2025 was a year of headline grabbing catchphrases. Each phrase was carefully crafted to generate an emotional reaction – no surprise then that Oxford University Press named ‘rage bait’ as its word of the year.
Underneath the headlines, senior leaders have been navigating shifting sands. And if 2025 taught us anything, it’s to expect uncertainty. With a client list many would envy, now feels like the right time to reflect on the year’s themes.
Impact works with over 25,000 people annually to support learning and development. While I didn’t meet all of them, I coached and facilitated executives across tech, finance, automotive, retail, pharma, manufacturing and not-for-profit sectors. My role also connects me weekly with senior decision makers, and in 2025 I led events including, Executive Retreats at our Lake District HQ, webinars, London roundtables and company-wide sessions with guest speakers. Here's what I heard:
What were the key trends of 2025?
Leading a humanfirst culture
Whether its shareholder demands, responding to changing market conditions or internally driven change, the pressures to do ‘more with less’ has not reduced. The overwhelming sense from our clients is that this pressure has increased.
While the media is focusing on how technology is replacing jobs and business performance, the leaders that I have spoken to are recognising the significant role they play to create a people-first culture and support the people that are doing the work. Here's my US counterpart, Erin Devito speaking to HR Executive on exactly this topic.
One executive who joined our weekly UK meeting described how much they are noticing the emotional load on people and what this means for employee wellbeing strategies. Another described how they are leading by example by setting clear time-management boundaries and role modelling how it’s ok to not be ‘always on’.
In 2025, Impact released our leadership playbook, which captures our point of view of leadership as a human service, take a look, it’s interactive and full of great resources.
Take me to the leadership playbook
The inevitable AI topic (for L&D and leadership)
The impact and opportunity that AI presents was a topic of most, but importantly not all, conversations in 2025. The senior leaders I spoke to were implementing AI where it made sense, primarily to drive operational efficiencies and to enhance creative needs.
There is an expectation from executive leaders that AI tools are integrated and used as a daily practice. Senior leaders are tasked with creating an experimentation culture for AI and appropriate risk taking is welcomed. Using AI agents as team members and introducing chatbots for learning content is often in tension with the context of a challenging economy and marketplace, requiring a doubling down on profit margin and reduced risk appetite.
While there are still some AI related skills gaps, the greater concern for senior leaders is the need to do largescale reskilling within ethical guardrails. Most organisations do not want to reduce headcount, but find ways to support people to adapt and flex to add value in new ways as AI completes more manual tasks.
What this means for leadership is still unclear. One webinar participant claimed they’d prefer an AI leader over their human one and another sent their avatar to a learning session they couldn’t attend. These might not be regular occurrences yet, but show how far we’ve come in 12 months of technological advancement.
We’re still talking about the return to the office
Emotional and social impacts of the pandemic, challenges of leading and managing a hybrid workforce and the seemingly straightforward, yet very loaded question of how many days should we expect people to be in the office, were all frequent topics of conversation with the senior leaders I spoke with over the year.
Some organisations have a highly flexible model, while others have reintroduced a rigid structure of office working. I am not sure anyone thinks they have the formula quite right though. What is certain is that post-pandemic work expectations have left many people with differing needs and engagement with hybrid working.
Again, the need to lead healthy, productive and engaged cultures was a connected theme. Senior leaders continue to test different approaches while experiencing resistance from pockets of their organisation.
The learning focus of 2026
Push back against digital everything
While hybrid working, access to digital learning and the drive for business efficiencies all have benefits, they miss one thing. Our innate human need for meaningful connection. 2026 will continue to be a challenging year for many industries. In order to meet that challenge, strong teams (both actual teams and cross-functional working groups) with effective relationships will be more important than ever. We will see even more of a shift towards meeting in-person and large group events as we crave the energy and engagement from being with others away from the screen.
High context learning
Context is everything. While off-the-shelf solutions are often offered at a low price-point, they too often are misaligned with the realities of the organisation and individual learner. In 2026 there will be an increased value placed on customised, high impact experiential methods, supported by short, focused virtual sessions (often called microsessions). This will be best achieved by ensuring that each learning method is used for what is best at - generative AI and AI coaching for self-led learning; virtual facilitated sessions for developing skills at scale and in-person facilitated sessions for building strong relationships. All of which must be curated in a way that resonates with the learner themselves. We're responding to this with the launch of Lead Forward: scalable ways to build leadership capability, fast. Find out more here.
Learning agility and flexibility
The changing, increasingly complex nature of the problems we face require new skills, new mindsets, new approaches. They require us to learn – to continuously learn, adapt, and let go of that which no longer serves us. For this reason, future potential is as much about someone’s ability and commitment to learning as it is about their performance.
What’s more, this continuous learning has to happen in the flow of work. Individuals will need to become adept at balancing a commitment to both performance and learning, seamlessly noticing skill and capability gaps and closing them on the fly. This is called learning agility, and it is now a key differentiator for leadership and performance.
Holding competing demands
2026 will continue to see changes to our organisations and the way that we then do work as a result. What this will mean for us is that we will continue to need to balance things that feel in opposition to each other. For example, we often hear the need to innovate to offer new products or services that give a competitive advantage and growth. However, innovation does not happen without investment in time or resources. How can we afford to spend scarce resource yet invest in innovations that we aren’t sure will work? We will need to learn how to manage these tensions or polarities by leading cultures where we don’t always have the ‘right answer’ and can operate by sensing and responding.
What can we take from this?
The headlines will keep shifting, but the work remains human. Teams need time together, leaders need context, and we all need the agility to learn in the flow of work. The businesses that will thrive in 2026 will be those that build human-centred organisations, innovating responsibly while protecting wellbeing and performance.