The state of L&D in 2025: What 115,000 learners taught us

Monica Karunakaran [00:00:00]:
Think beyond the training focus on building a learning ecosystem. The most effective organizations aren’t just delivering content, they’re creating environments where learning is continuous, it’s embedded, and it’s tied to performance.

Hannah Beaver [00:00:19]:
You’re listening to How to Make a Leader, a leadership development podcast from Big Think+ where we take the biggest ideas from the best minds in learning and development and distill them into actionable insights. I’m your host, Hannah Beaver. Today, we are keeping it in the family. In the Big Think+ family, that is. I am very excited to introduce two of my superstar colleagues, Charlotte Sharpe and Monica Karunakaran. I’ll let them introduce themselves shortly, but as a quick teaser, Charlotte is the Managing Director of Research and Innovation here at Big Think+, who has built her career on understanding learning through research and design. She has a PhD in learning and over a decade of experience researching individual learning and organizational change. Monica is a Product Manager, formerly a Senior Instructional Designer at Big Think+ who has also dedicated her career towards learning and education.

Hannah Beaver [00:01:23]:
Also holding a PhD in curriculum and instruction, Monica has experience as a maths teacher, university professor and researcher. This conversation will be a data focused look back and look ahead, sharing insights that we’ve learned over the past year from 115,000 learners that use our platform. We’ll also be talking about the data uncovered in our user survey of 300 professionals and managers and what these findings mean for the broader state of the L&D industry. Today, I am particularly excited for Charlotte and Monica to offer their personal observations and predictions and to fill in some of the gaps that go beyond just the numbers. Charlotte and Monica, we are very excited to have both of your brilliant minds on the pod today. Welcome.

Monica Karunakaran [00:02:19]:
Thanks for having us.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:02:21]:
It’s great to be here.

Hannah Beaver [00:02:23]:
So obviously you’ve both dedicated your careers to learning, so I have to ask, as avid learners, is there anything that you are learning outside of work right now? Charlotte, I know you’re a baker, so perhaps something within that realm.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:02:38]:
I’ve been learning a lot more about baking and about making bread in particular. So it’s really fun. It’s a place where I feel like there’s a low risk to messing up because even the worst loaf of bread I’ve made has been edible by someone or something. So I love that.

Monica Karunakaran [00:02:56]:
So I recently lost my mom and I’m dealing with her estate and so the thing that I’ve been learning a lot is how to deal with estate planning.

Hannah Beaver [00:03:07]:
So our listeners can learn a little bit more about you both. I’d love to ask you both how you found yourself at Big Think+ and working in L&D. I know a lot of the guests that we’ve had on before have kind of accidentally found their way into L&D by one way or another. So is that the same case for you, or did you always know that you wanted to go into this industry?

Monica Karunakaran [00:03:27]:
So, for me, I started as a middle school math teacher, then I taught college courses and did research on helping others be comfortable teaching and learning about math. And I’ve been here coming up on two years, so it’s felt like a really natural transition for me because I know about best learning practices, and now I get to incorporate that into, you know, this L&D space learning.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:03:54]:
I have a little bit of a similar background. Monica and I both come from math education. I was also a math teacher. And then when I went to kind of expand on my education, I worked on a large research project during my doctoral work that really looked at systems, educational systems at scale and how individuals learning can either be helped or hampered by processes, systems and supports. And so while that was really focused on school systems and really large educational systems and how those systems support teacher learning, principal learning, leader learning, I found since then that there’s so many corollaries to different industries outside of education. So I was a professor for a few years here in Syracuse, New York. And then since 2022, I came to Big Think+. And I think what excited me most about working for Big Think+ was just working in a small team that really had its eyes really well fixed on its values and the impact it wanted to drive.

Hannah Beaver [00:05:03]:
So if you’re listening to this podcast, you are likely familiar with Big Think+, where we all work, but in case you’re not, we’re a learning vendor that provides digital leadership development content in the form of a library of expert led L&D designed video lessons. So in that vein, can you tell us both what you do at Big Think+ and how your insights will fit into the conversation today?

Monica Karunakaran [00:05:29]:
So I started in instructional design and was really able to dig into how our content shapes learning here at Big Think+, making sure it was effective and engaging. And then I was able to tap into my research background to better understand what our customers did through a learning experience survey. And now I’m a product manager and I have an opportunity to learn about how digital leadership development interacts with learners in a more holistic way.

Hannah Beaver [00:06:02]:
Awesome. What about you, Charlotte?

Charlotte Sharpe [00:06:04]:
I’m the Managing Director of Research and insights at Big Think+. That puts me in this kind of neat intersection between content and our content development and content strategy and then the platform and the technology team that builds it and brings those two things together into this neat experience that our learners and learning managers enjoy. So my role is really to keep an eye out for the kinds of data that would inform both our content strategy as well as what platform offerings we might bring to market day-to-day. I do a lot of market research, user research, and analytics investigations. I look at our data not just who’s watching and where, but what time of day and also what content is really resonating based on usage. And also the kinds of things like the qualitative feedback and comments that people are leaving.

Hannah Beaver [00:06:58]:
Before we dig into the juicy numbers and the data, who are we learning from? Who are the people behind the numbers that you’re about to share?

Charlotte Sharpe [00:07:08]:
Well, we have some insights that we’re here to talk through today, really on two scales. At the macro scale, I’ll be able to talk a little bit about how we see our partners, our organizations that we partner with, how we see them using our content as a core driver of leadership development in their organizations. So on that front, we have more than 75 organizations across more than 14 industries, on average about 10,000 learners a month and growing. And so those organizations range from really large US based multinational firms to pretty small hospitality organizations and really everything in between. So it really gives us this nice diverse set of data looking across how we’re being used, how our content’s being deployed, and then also what learners themselves are coming and looking for on the platform.

Monica Karunakaran [00:08:07]:
In late 2024, we ran a survey with some of our customers. We surveyed 311 professionals. Nearly half of those are team or people managers. About 40% were individual contributors and about 10% are senior leaders. So we have a variety of people who participated and then about a third reported being a member of their organization’s L&D team. So we have a good spread of people that we gathered some data from that we learned about what their experience is like both in with our platform, but also just in the general L&D space.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:08:44]:
Yeah. And what’s nice about these complimentary data sets is really by looking at what folks are doing on our platform and what they’re pursuing and what they’re learning about, and then also what they’re telling us directly on the survey that Monica ran in the fall.

Hannah Beaver [00:09:01]:
And I love too that the findings are pretty representative of the broader industry as well and trends that I know that we’re all tapped into from reading Articles and other data reports. So I’m really excited to talk about how these insights that we’re seeing at Big Think+ are also representative of the broader L&D industry. So why don’t we start here from the data and your observations of learners on our platform over the past year. What has been keeping L&D leaders up at night? What are some of the biggest challenges that they’re facing and that we’re trying to solve?

Monica Karunakaran [00:09:43]:
When we asked L&D leaders about their biggest challenges, there were three themes that stood out from the data. Engaging employees, measuring training effectiveness, and keeping training content up to date and relevant. So getting learners to not just participate, but truly invest in what they’re learning, knowing that that investment is actually making a change. And L&D leaders being able to track that and understand how that change is happening and then making sure that it evolves alongside the business needs.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:10:16]:
One of the things that we’re seeing is that we are meeting with a lot of L&D leaders who are trying to support a really large and growing workforce, take the next step in their leadership journey, and they’re trying to democratize that opportunity to learn across the business while also highlighting specific skills that are really core to their values. So, for instance, one of the services that we provide is we help learning managers build custom curations of our content that they can deploy in their program. So that’s been a nice little opportunity to see what’s trending or what content is really resonating in these organizations. One of the things that we see is there’s a growing demand for content from mid level managers and specifically helping them put into practice the kinds of values that are really core to the organization. So for instance, if accountability and transparency and vulnerability are really core to how the organization imagines what a great leader looks like, how do you operationalize that when you’re hiring somebody new as a manager, or if you’re a manager that has to have really difficult conversations to bring accountability to life in performance evaluations. You know, a lot of these L&D leaders are looking for ways to support new managers or growing and, you know, developing managers to put those things into practice in a way that not only helps them with their individual skills development, but also tries to undergird the values of the organization. We recently dropped a class in our platform, actually where the expert talks about how culture is not a set of beliefs, that’s really a set of actions, and those actions are motivated by the beliefs underneath them. And I think that’s a good example of how we see a lot of leaders using our content to give folks the skills to hire in ways that exemplify the company’s values or have difficult conversations in ways that exemplify the company’s values.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:12:20]:
That’s one of the big things that we see is that, as Monica said, not just engaging employees in content, not just measuring whether their L&D teams are effective, but really thinking about how L&D teams can be central to creating the culture that organizational leaders are trying to forge nowadays.

Monica Karunakaran [00:12:42]:
So also, you know, while we see that engaging employees is definitely a pretty universal concern, our survey also showed that around a third of our respondents highlighted other issues like securing budget, aligning their programs with their business goals, and integrating new technologies and platforms. So when you take that collectively, it’s really about a balancing act, right? Like Charlotte is saying of making learning effective, but also making it sustainable. While our world is changing so rapidly.

Hannah Beaver [00:13:14]:
How can some of these challenges be addressed? I’m curious how it’s shaped your thinking specifically from the vantage point as a provider of learning content.

Monica Karunakaran [00:13:26]:
So I think a focus on well crafted learning objectives can go a long way in clearly linking what employees should be able to do after their training and how that aligns with the business priorities. When you focus on both of those things, it helps to both drive engagement, but also makes a strong case for the importance of your learning initiatives that you’re working on. Here at Big Think, we’ve ensured that each video lesson has those clear objectives to help support our users with making those arguments in their own organizations.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:13:58]:
One of the challenges that a lot of these folks face to kind of build on what we were talking about before is that if you’re really targeting leadership development, some of those things feel really far out on the horizon. Just to pile onto what Monica said about really having really narrow and clear and focused learning objectives and thinking about the kinds of behaviors that you might expect to see across leadership in your organization if everyone were on the same page with your cultural values, or if everyone were kind of rowing in the same direction towards either realigning around a new mission or vision and then thinking about what’s the cost of not doing those behaviors in a really aligned way. And I think that’s where I see a lot of really clever and business minded learning leaders stepping up, is that they’re not just arguing for the impact of learning on the organization, but they’re also thinking of it in terms of the cost of a lack of alignment. So to go back to the hiring example, if hiring is a behavior where you might expect managers and leaders to really demonstrate an organization’s values. What’s the cost of not having an aligned hiring approach? Well, you’re going to have differences from team to team in the quality of folks that they get in or in the level of bias that they do or don’t use in those hiring practices. So I think really thinking both in terms of the impact, but also the cost of not acting is a strategy that I see a lot of astute folks in the market using.

Hannah Beaver [00:15:28]:
And when we look at those challenges across different company sizes or industries, are you seeing patterns in the data here? Are you seeing certain sectors struggling more with specific challenges over others?

Charlotte Sharpe [00:15:40]:
The day-to-day experience of those challenges changes a little bit. In small companies like ours, we have to move really fast, we have to make quick decisions and we have to make the best decisions that we can. But we work on really small teams. So in organizations like that, learning and development is often maybe one of the last things to get planned for or it’s kind of embedded in hr. And it’s a little bit difficult for those folks to really argue for the importance of L&D. When these organizations are really large and suddenly L&D is such a small part of the overall business that it’s harder for them to make an impact. Once they are at that really big scale, the nature of the problem doesn’t really change. Right? Whether it’s arguing for why L&D needs to have a seat at the table, or making sure that the impact of any given program is really big enough to be felt or clear enough to monitor the outcomes.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:16:38]:
But I don’t see it really changing industry to industry so much as just the nature of the problem day-to-day, depending on the scale of the organization.

Hannah Beaver [00:16:48]:
And I would say that a lot of these problems do seem to be interconnected. So I’m curious if you see any domino effects where solving one problem therefore solves another.

Monica Karunakaran [00:17:02]:
Yeah, absolutely. These challenges don’t exist in isolation. Solving one can create a ripple effect that might help address others. And like Charlotte was saying, depending on the unique experiences of each organization, how much one matters just varies. So for example, you know, if you’re able to demonstrate your impact of training on your employees performance and on business outcomes, that puts you in a stronger position to secure funding. Right. Or keeping your training relevant. It doesn’t just improve learning outcomes, it also drives engagement and gets people excited and wanting to learn more and wanting to learn the next thing.

Monica Karunakaran [00:17:44]:
So tackling, you know, one of these issues can create momentum that Makes other challenges a little easier to solve.

Hannah Beaver [00:17:56]:
Let’s talk about these skills and competencies. What have you seen from the data that are some of the most in demand leadership skills based on learners and learning managers using Big Think+ this last year?

Monica Karunakaran [00:18:10]:
In our survey we see that interpersonal effectiveness and team dynamics are really in high demand. Right? Leaders want to communicate well. They want to be able to collaborate effectively. They want to build their emotional intelligence so that they can better navigate the complexities of working with other people.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:18:28]:
Well, I’ll speak from two different standpoints. One is just sort of looking at cross usage of our platform this year. But also in the last couple of months we’ve released a new feature that in house we call interest gathering. But it’s kind of like a little survey that learners can fill out when they first get to the platform that populates what they see on their home screen, some recommendations based on their interests. And so that’s kind of cool. We can now hear it straight from the learners mouths of what they’re really interested in. So looking across both of those, we have what I call the big four Leadership management. Communication and emotional intelligence are really the four big interest areas across our platform.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:19:08]:
Really across time, even just over the last few years. But last year certainly that folks come to our content library for. But then if we look within that, I do see some kind of interesting trends. I was actually just pulling up the data for this the other day and something that seems to be really trending right now is giving and receiving feedback. I think a lot of organizations have a performance review cycle in early spring and I wonder if that’s really why we’re seeing a big lift in that in the last couple of months as people are preparing for or thinking about the way that they can give or receive feedback because that’s not always easy or intuitive. And then also from the standpoint of managers or leaders, we see a lot of interest in content about how to set goals for yourself and team and then how to motivate a team to really pursue those goals by building trust and connection between the team across the team, between the manager and the team, which really comes through communication skills. How do I build trust? How do I build these connections? How do I help people feel valued and feel listened to? What we’re learning is that these are skills and they’re skills that can be developed. One other thing that I’ll drop that I think is really interesting is that we see a lot of learners who are interested in career development content in particular.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:20:30]:
I think sometimes that career development can mean how do I be ready for the next big opportunity that’s in my path, or how do I stand out in the role that I’m in so that I have an opportunity to move up when the time comes.

Hannah Beaver [00:20:46]:
To your most recent point, Charlotte, I think that’s really interesting thinking about how people are thinking about career development. I know in LinkedIn’s workplace learning report for 2025, it framed it in a similar way, noting that career progress is kind of a number one motivation for people to learn and how can we cultivate those skills among people? They feel that they’re getting career development, but also we’re nurturing them while they’re in the current moment that they’re in. So I think that’s just an interesting theme that I’ve also noticed just coming out in articles and reports recently. This year as well. Also to mention emotional intelligence. I mean, Daniel Goleman’s work is such a key example of this. I know we see that his content is eternally popular and everything that he puts out we always receive a lot of feedback on and people are really engaged with. So it really is heartwarming, like you mentioned, Charlotte, to see people really wanting to invest time in a skill like emotional development, which, as you mentioned, we assume that you’re just born with.

Hannah Beaver [00:21:47]:
But Daniel Goleman argues it is a skill that you can cultivate and learn and improve upon, both in the workplace and out, so.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:21:54]:
Even thinking about myself, I’m kind of taking on a new role. As I mentioned before, I used to work in the products management team, but now I’m leading out on sort of a separate level of research and insights. And it’s really been a good opportunity for me to ask myself, right from the Daniel Goleman framework of like this self awareness piece, like, what are my strengths? What am I like as a leader, as a manager? Where do I have to grow? And then looking to surround yourself with people that make up for the difference. We see a lot of folks who are in the midst of a career change or looking for that next opportunity or looking for a promotion or make a bigger impact. And those are the times when people often come to platforms like ours and ask, okay, what am I like as a leader? What do I want to be like as a manager? And how can I double down on the skills that have served me so far and kind of lead with the talents that got me here?

Monica Karunakaran [00:22:50]:
AI is really the elephant in the room here, right? AI is coming onto the scene and it’s really underscoring the importance of that emotional intelligence, the human connection. Two things kind of stick out to me to watch. One is maintaining strong human connections. That’s just such a huge piece. While we bring AI into our workplaces, Making sure that that technology enhances our work but doesn’t replace it is super key. And then a second one is setting effective guardrails around when we bring technology into the workplace, making sure that leaders, but also employees develop this judgment. To know when you can rely on AI, when you can use it, and it’s going to enhance what you’re doing, and when you need that human connection, that human oversight, when that part is essential, and when you can’t kind of go around it.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:23:43]:
When I think about how this rise in human skills is kind of paralleled by the rise in AI, one of the things that’s coming to mind is Gallup just released some findings about how so few people, particularly young people at work, feel like someone at work values them or cares for them. I think it was something like 39% of folks under 35 felt that anyone at work cared about them as a person. There’s this open question right now in the market about is in office work versus remote work, which is more productive? Where do people feel more like a greater connection to an organization’s mission? Does it make a difference there? But I think I was just talking to somebody the other day who is now working, working in office after a return to office policy. They’re working in a place where other people at their company work, but nobody that works there is on their team. So, you know, they’re still working remotely with a team across the country, but they’re in an office. So where is that person gonna find that sense of, like, value, connection, and that connection between his purpose and the mission of the organization? Well, it’s probably gonna be in those relationships. I bring this up because this question of how do we maintain sharpened human skills in the age where we’re asking AI to do more work for us and help us move faster through our work? I do think that one of the things I see is more emphasis on leadership teams in helping people feel valued and helping people connect their own personal goals to the mission of the organization. I see that as a pretty big emphasis coming in the next couple of years is really reviving that level of employee engagement by helping people feel personally connected to the mission of the organization.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:25:46]:
And really, the front line on that is managers.

Monica Karunakaran [00:25:50]:
And we see evidence of this in our survey as well. People not just wanting professional development. That’s strictly tied to their job responsibilities, but appreciating that holistic experience. And I think this is where team managers can kind of tie into the person that is working for them, because skills like communication, even leadership, certainly problem solving, they aren’t just confined to the workplace, but they’re certainly relevant to the workplace. And so we had a lot of respondents saying they appreciated our content because it helps them grow holistically. We speak to that human connection and how to kind of perpetuate that.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:26:31]:
Especially, in organizations that have to be really focused on technical skills and staying ahead of the curve on things like AI, Right. Or on software engineering or like services engineering and services design, where really the fight to be first, the fight to be best is so important to the organization’s survival and thriving, but also that at the end of the day, like, these are people, and people want to feel valued, they want to feel connected, they want to feel seen. There’s no AI that can do that. And so I think really thinking about, how do you invest in your people so that they feel connected to the organization and they want to bring their best to work. I think it’s really lovely and it’s really wonderful getting to work with so many learning managers who are champions of this kind of thinking.

Hannah Beaver [00:27:17]:
What you both are talking about is reminding me of the work of Zach Mercurio, who talks about the power of mattering and like the science and feeling like you matter. And he does really great work and keynote speeches and has a book on how to create that sentiment among employees and humans to feel like they matter. You know, whether that’s at work, whether that’s just that they’re contributing and they matter in society too. I just think it’s such an interesting concept.

Hannah Beaver [00:27:52]:
Let’s now talk about learning experience. So what patterns are you both seeing in how people consume learning content? And are you seeing certain preferences for format or length of engagement?

Monica Karunakaran [00:28:08]:
We’re seeing a clear preference for learning that is short, practical, directly relevant to their role. They can apply it right away. You know, employees don’t want to step away from their work for long periods of time to complete training. They want something that kind of fits seamlessly into their workflow. So this means content that’s easy to access, immediately applicable, and designed to make an impact without requiring a huge time commitment from them.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:28:37]:
Something that I have been noticing over the last couple of years of looking at our analytics on our platform is when are people learning? Okay, I have no explanation for this, only insights and Wednesdays and Thursdays at lunchtime what is that about? I don’t know. But that is when we see the highest level of user activity on our platform is Wednesdays and Thursdays between about 10 eastern to about 2 eastern. My best guess is that as people get later in the week, they kind of are either, you know, putting off that last item on their to do list and looking for a little bit of a brain break and they come to content providers like us to see like, oh, what’s something I could watch to just level myself up a little bit right now? Or it’s those opportunities to think about, like, what’s up for me next week, you know, what do I have coming in terms of my to dos or in terms of my next meeting with my manager and how can I frame myself, really, really position myself? Well, I’m really curious whether that’s true among other content providers and also among even just in house made learning and development programs. And it does make me wonder if people were to launch programs on a Wednesday morning, if they would see a big uptick or a big, you know, a lot of folks coming in at Wednesday or Thursday lunchtime to really check it out and see what’s going on in that program.

Hannah Beaver [00:30:01]:
And then what does this completion and engagement data tell us about what makes learning really stick and resonate with learners?

Charlotte Sharpe [00:30:10]:
Yeah. So I can share two insights. The first is that all of the content that we provide. So one caveat is that we can only really talk about microlearning because that’s the kind of content that we provide to our partners. I can’t really talk about what makes learning stick or have an impact that’s like in person training or more extended content. But that said, big think plus, we do build our content together as these sort of modular like Legos, right? And we will build them into more extended learning experiences that we call courses. And each course has several classes and each class has several videos or activities, reflections, missions, opportunities to really think and apply the learning. So one thing that I’ve noticed in the last couple of years is that we have more learning teams who are deploying these courses programmatically in their organization, often in cohort experiences.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:31:03]:
So I know of at least three organizations who have done this in the last year and they’ve seen a lot of success. So a lot of times it looks like a learning team will put out a call for manager recommendations for somebody on their team to be part of a leadership development cohort. The idea is that this cohort will give you an opportunity to collaborate with others across the business across different functions and learn more about how the organization sees leadership and how they want to grow you as a leader. And then they’ll do something like a four or six week cohort where every week you’re expected to do some learning on your own. And that’s usually when they come to our platform. And then they maybe even have synchronous or even asynchronous sort of meetup where they can either do a discussion board and post about what they’re learning and how they’re applying it at work, or they might actually have a zoom meeting or something at work where they talk about their learning learnings. So those extended programs that are really kind of gated by a time like a calendar, we see really high completion rates. And I think there’s a couple pieces to it.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:32:08]:
One kind of breaking the learning up into small bite sized pieces that can be done over time, but that there’s still really thoughtful thematic development I think makes a big difference. Right. People don’t see it as a six hour course. They see it as six weeks of finding ten minutes here and there, which feels a lot more manageable. And yet the kind of activities that our courses include give them a chance to think about how to apply it in their role. And then the discussion boards give them a chance to talk about that. So I think that’s one piece of it. I also think another piece of it is that it’s really thoughtful to have this kind of cohort experience where you feel like you’re part of a community.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:32:47]:
I talked to one learner last year who talked about that they sign up for every leadership kind of cohort experience that they can because they geographically want to move. And they know that the more people that they know across the company, in different sectors, in different departments and in different countries, the more it opens up possibilities to network and maybe one day move to a different place that the organization has headquarters. So I see that as like a really nice, you know, way to not just get employee buy in, but also to help people feel that sense of connection we were talking about before.

Hannah Beaver [00:33:27]:
So in the spirit of learning, what has the data taught you? I’m curious if you had any assumptions around learning behaviors that have been challenged or perhaps disproved.

Monica Karunakaran [00:33:38]:
Engagement remains a top challenge. So even though our users rate our content highly, just having great training available isn’t enough. You have to think about, like Charlotte was saying, how to make it really applicable to what you need on that Tuesday morning or what you need for a particular cohort. Thinking about perhaps embedding learning into your daily workflows in some way, or aligning content with specific career growth opportunities. You really have to be able to leverage it. It’s not enough to just have great content that you can use. You have to think about how to make it engaging and relevant to people. And then also, something that really surprised me was that people don’t just want professional development that’s tied just to your job.

Monica Karunakaran [00:34:28]:
And we’ve talked about this. You know, people of course, are thinking about what their next role is, so they don’t want it so specific to what they’re working on. But the surprising aspect to me is they really appreciate content that can help them as a holistic person, not just as someone in their specific role. It makes sense that skills like communication, leadership, problem solving aren’t just confined to the workplace. And our surveys show that a lot of employees really appreciate that content that helps them grow in other ways that they can go home and have a better conversation with a partner at home or a colleague at work equally, and they appreciate both of those things.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:35:09]:
One of the things that I like is, again, kind of heartening is it feels like the world is just so different. But maybe things aren’t changing as fast as we think that they are, right? If at the end of the day, what it takes to be really successful in your career is being a good listener and taking time to show care for others, they’re not all that different than they were 20 years ago, a hundred years ago. Like, I think that in some ways it’s reassuring. As much as people want new information about technical innovations like AI, they also want to know, how do I tell somebody they’re doing a really great job and what’s the quickest way to do that? Or how do I deal with situations that make me really uncomfortable? So I think I assumed when coming into this role, when I would have access to the data, it would be like, oh, that every new sweeping innovation is going to bring with it brand new problems to what it means to be a good manager, a good leader, or a learning manager who’s navigating all this? But in some ways, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right? The challenges being human are pretty universal.

Hannah Beaver [00:36:18]:
And do you see gaps between what organizations think they need and then what the data is actually showing that they need?

Charlotte Sharpe [00:36:27]:
I have so much respect for folks who are really heading up learning in really large organizations, especially where they have to be so thoughtful of the diversity of learning needs across the organization. But one of the Things I think is especially tricky is that the job skills training, like Monica was just talking about, like, what do I need to be able to do well and quickly and efficiently as part of this job? But then there’s also, like, job mobility skills. Like, what are the skills that I need in order to get the next opportunity? I think one of the things that’s tricky about folks who are in this position is they know what the current needs of the organization are, but they also know that their employees want opportunities to grow and opportunities to develop their own career path, which sometimes means exiting the organization. Right? Because there’s not an opportunity for them right now. It reminds me of this article I read just the other day by Gianpiero Petriglieri. And they really talked about, like, three ways that learning managers think of learning. And one was of really thinking about how to equip workers with job skills. The second was folks who really see themselves more as challengers, where they really want learning to be a way that sparks innovation, like a tool to spark innovation across the organization.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:37:51]:
And for that, these are the kinds of cool things you hear about where, oh, they got all their software engineers to take a ballet class, right? Or they took everybody to a sandcastle museum or something, right? Where the whole idea is like, take you out of your element. It’s going to spark a new idea that creates the next big innovation for the organization. So those learning managers think of themselves as challengers, where it’s not about equipping people to do the jobs they have now, but really helping them think outside the box and create these learning playgrounds. And then the third kind of learning leader was somebody who saw themselves as building communities and building connections across the organization over time.

Hannah Beaver [00:38:29]:
What advice would you give to L&D leaders who are planning their 2025 strategy and beyond based on all of these insights that we’ve talked about today?

Monica Karunakaran [00:38:39]:
To think beyond the training, focus on building a learning ecosystem. I think the most effective organizations aren’t just delivering content. They’re creating environments where learning is continuous, it’s embedded, and it’s tied to performance.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:38:57]:
And in terms of tactical, I would say get into your data and don’t let perfectionism make you overly index on where things aren’t going well. But instead, look for those successes and think about how you could build on them, especially the unplanned successes. Are there places in the organization where you see high amounts of usage or time spent learning on platforms like ours or other vendors? What’s going on there? Go at it from an investigator’s mindset and try to partner with somebody in that team or in that organization to see if you can build on that success. Because a lot of times those areas of success can be really instructive for how to build your next program that will be that much more impactful.

Hannah Beaver [00:39:43]:
Fantastic. Well, thank you both very much. It’s been a special, special privilege to have two of my colleagues on today. So thank you very much for your time and insights and we really, really appreciate it.

Charlotte Sharpe [00:39:55]:
Thanks for having us. This was really fun. And thanks for letting me nerd out a little bit about data with you.

Monica Karunakaran [00:40:01]:
This has been great.

Hannah Beaver [00:40:03]:
Thank you as always for listening. For more information on what we’re doing here at Big Think+, check out the show notes for a link to our website. For more from our guests today, we’ve added their LinkedIn pages so you can shoot them a connection. And finally, for more from How to Make a Leader, make sure you subscribe so you never miss an episode. We’ll be back next month and every month with more insights from another L&D expert, and we’ll catch you next time as we learn How to Make a Leader.

In this episode of How to Make a Leader, we sit down with members of Big Think+’s very own product team, Charlotte Sharpe and Monica Karunakaran. They share insights learned from observing the learning habits and preferences of 115,000 learners that used our platform last year, as well as learnings from our 300 person user survey. 

They share juicy insights such as the truth behind optimal learning times (and length of content), the top skills learners searched on our platform, and the top challenges keeping L&D leaders up at night. 

You’ll learn:

• The type of career development that learners actually care about
• The most in-demand leadership skills
• What’s keeping L&D leaders up at night (and how to fix it)
• The humans skills that matter more than AI
• How to think about L&D strategy

Things to listen for:

(00:00) Introducing Charlotte Sharpe and Monica Karunakaran
(05:13) The role of Big Think+ in shaping leadership development
(06:52) Insights from a year of data from 115,000 learners
(09:27) What’s keeping L&D leaders up at night
(13:10) Leadership content for mid-level managers
(15:32) Balancing employee engagement with measurable success
(17:55) The most in-demand leadership skills
(19:06) Why emotional intelligence is so important
(26:15) Data on the learning experience (when, where, how long)
(28:21) The influence of AI on leadership development strategies
(33:22) The biggest surprise with the data
(35:12) The future of L&D: Integrating human connection with technology

To learn more about Charlotte and Monica, check out their LinkedIn profiles: Charlotte Sharpe & Monica Karunakaran.