The future of learning and development

Published: October 21, 2025

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An In Good Company podcast with Ani Acker, Strategic Learning Executive.

Leadership and learning: A conversation with Ani Acker

What does learning really mean in 2025? The relationship between learning, leadership, technology, and organisational culture is evolving faster than ever. From AI-powered personalisation to learning in the flow of work, the future is being shaped right now. But are people being connected to the learning that they need? And if they are, what is proving most effective?

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Ani Acker is a Strategic Learning Executive with over 25 years’ experience in L&D. She joins Dan to talk about the future of learning and development, including:

The need for an L&D revolution
Aligning learning with business strategy and outcomes
Becoming ‘students of the business’
The core skills all L&D professionals need
Building a learning culture
Why experiential learning is vital for real behaviour change

How do you change people's perspectives on the value of L&D?

"Rule number one, be a student of the business. You have to understand and almost become an expert in every function in the organization. I can go in and talk to product development about product strategies because I've read up and I've done work with that. If I'm talking to engineers, I have to be versed in what AWS is or Google Cloud or Python. I need to understand the reality to then think about how I align learning to business.

Oftentimes, what happens is Chief Learning Officers or Heads of Learning think only about the business vision for the next five years. And that's really important, you need to think about where's the business headed. But that's just scratching the surface. You then have to dig deeper, to start having conversations and what I call listening session, and start to really align at that level.

You bring the business along for the ride with you. It's not about you sitting in your office looking at decks and reading objectives and trying to make sense out of it. You're only going to do that when you go in and start having a conversation. And so that's rule number one. Be a student of the business. Be a good listener."

Learning must be experiential

"We need to be more experiential than we've ever been in learning. We've hit a slump in L&D. Years back, everything used to be ILT (instructor-led training), and then everybody went crazy with, ‘oh, it costs money, it means travel’, so then we focused on this concept of a democratization of learning, right? And we're like, ‘Hey, what’s the biggest amount of content that I can push on employees… I'll pay hundreds and thousands of dollars for LinkedIn Learning. And twenty thousand titles are available in any topic you want. It's for you right now. Go and learn.’

So, we kind of swung the pendulum from one extreme to the other. But I think there's a good middle ground here. There are different experiences you can create that are going to drive behaviour change. But show me one person who has actually changed their behaviour by listening to a LinkedIn. And I'm not talking LinkedIn Learning; I mean listening to someone talk about coaching skills, right? Show me one person who has become an expert in that.

The only way that people become experts in something or build a skill is by actually experiencing it: they're doing something, they're learning, getting feedback, and having the opportunity to experiment. Even if you want to offer up a video, there has to be something alongside it that allows the learner to experience that topic. Whether it's an opportunity to apply it or talk about it. The experiential piece has to be part of it."