2025 Chief Learning & Talent Officers Priorities & Predictions

Members of i4cp’s Chief Learning & Talent Officer Board predict that 2025 will:

• Be a year with heightened expectations of the learning and talent function to deliver business value despite limited technology and other resources.
• See CLOs and CTOs seek more collaboration across HR and other functions to promote and reinforce cultures that enable and reward continuous learning.
• Have CLOs and CTOs laser-focused on building future-ready capability among managers and the workforce.

In addition, clearly there is much work to be done regarding AI—over half (56%) of learning and talent leaders surveyed indicated that they believe their organizations are only “somewhat prepared” for an AI-enabled future of work; 21% indicated their organizations are prepared, and an equal number said their organizations are “not prepared”—and no one said their organization is “very prepared.” And just over half (51%) of responding CLTO Board members indicated that they view the available talent pool as a top-three external issue of concern—they see it as posing a potential threat to their organization’s ability to execute on their 2025 strategies. 

Priorities

Increasing manager effectiveness in the face of complex and increasing demands— leadership development remains a perennial concern for the learning and talent leaders, but a three-year trend to prioritize manager effectiveness in the face of complex and increasing demands has risen to the top. There are several factors driving this, including the nature of work shifting to more distributed and more team-based, as well as the need for managers to focus on more than performance and productivity, such as culture, employee well-being, and more.

Upskilling the organization’s workforce—in addition to building manager capabilities, 46% of chief learning and/or talent officers indicated they have prioritized the broad upskilling or reskilling of the organization’s workforce. This was already a trend, but the growth of AI has made it a critical need: nearly four of five survey participants (79%) said their organization’s workforce is unprepared or at best somewhat prepared to use generative AI in their work. The same study provided a major reason: only 18% of organizations offer generative AI training to most or all of their employees as of September 2024 (i4cp, 2025).  

Building or maintaining a healthy organizational culture—culture renovation remains a top concern for learning leaders, and this priority is no small effort. For many CLOs and CTOs, this will result in greater emphasis on building and rewarding the how of leadership (i.e., how a leader works with their teams and across the enterprise to deliver the desired outcomes). In many organizations, what it means to be a good leader is being redefined, along with updated measurements and incentives around leader behaviors that deliver desired business and employee outcomes. 

Leveraging AI to enhance learning and/or talent programs—the adoption of AI (including generative AI) is nearly unanimously viewed as important to CLTO Board members in the context of its role in the ability to deliver on their objectives in 2025. While only 16% considered it “very important,” over a third (34%) said it was “important,” 41% said it was “somewhat important.”

Establishing or improving the organization’s learning culture—continuous learning has long been a high-performance organization differentiator and is now a competitive necessity given the speed and frequency of technological change and the value workers across all generations place on their personal development. i4cp research has found that those who describe their organizations' cultures as healthy are 7x more likely to say they have learning centered cultures than those who describe their organizations' cultures as toxic  (i4cp, 2023b). Also, traits of a learning culture according to our previous research include:

• Active knowledge sharing permeates the organization
• Learning is an espoused organizational value
• Leaders (at all levels) are teaching
• Learning is reinforced in hiring and development
• Measuring learning’s effectiveness
• Managers rewarded for mobility and development

“  AI presents a major strategic opportunity for learning teams to showcase their agility, helping the organization adopt a transformative technology that will reshape the way we work with confidence. However, without embracing this shift, learning teams may miss a critical chance to reinforce their role and value in  guiding this transition."

Simon Brown  Global Learning & Development Leader EY

Chief Learning & Talent Officer Predictions

• The impact of technology, AI and generative AI more specifically will continue to be profound—leaders anticipate seeing AI in curriculum design and personalized learning; identifying top talent, successors, talent needs, and skill gaps; and more generally to free up capacity for more strategic work—including for managers by making talent processes easier.
   
• AI will continue to drive urgent need for upskilling; in some cases, this will lead to cost reductions (either through reduced headcount or increased efficiency). But more often AI-related upskilling will lead to augmented human capability with the ultimate benefits being reduced time on tasks, improved quality of outputs, and increased productivity overall. If both upskilling and AI implementation are done wisely and at scale, employees will shift from mundane tasks to more strategic and creative work and might even see a reduction in burnout and improved work-life balance.
   
• Emphasis will be on skills-centric learning and talent processes—learning and development ranked third highest in areas of anticipated investment in 2025 among members of all of i4cp’s various Boards. Emphasis for many will be on furthering organizational efforts to build, validate, and reward specific skills, making those skills more visible and transferrable internally, and linking those skills to specific jobs, projects, or tasks in the effort to deliver greater impact and improve the employee experience.
   
• There will be enhanced emphasis on cross-functional collaboration— collaborating effectively with other functions on shared priorities is a challenge 33% of learning leaders ranked in their top three for 2025. Other areas of HR will often partner with L&D and Talent in order to shift to more skills-centric processes, and the learning function will be seen as a key resource for AI upskilling as new platforms and features come online. 

To read the rest of the predictions from i4cp's other boards, download i4cp's 2025 Priorities & Predictions.