The Year Learning and Development Finally Got Strategic

As December arrives and the office party season begins its annual ritual of mild over-catering and forgotten resolutions, it is a reasonable moment to take stock of what 2024 has actually changed. Quite a lot, as it happens, particularly for anyone working in Learning and Development. The function has spent a good many years being treated as the organisational equivalent of a nice-to-have, somewhere between the subsidised gym membership and the quarterly away-day. In 2024, that started to shift rather noticeably.

The shift was driven not by any particular enlightenment on the part of senior leadership, but by a confluence of pressures that made ignoring L&D increasingly difficult. Generative AI arrived in the workplace in earnest. Skills gaps widened visibly. Talented people started asking uncomfortable questions about their development prospects before accepting offers. The result is that L&D has found itself in board conversations that would, not long ago, have been held without it.

The AI skills gap that nobody is quite keeping up with

Generative AI tools have moved from curiosity to working reality in most corporate technology environments over the course of 2024, and they have done so considerably faster than most L&D functions have been able to respond. Research published this year found that a meaningful proportion of employees, in some surveys approaching a quarter, actively wanted training in AI tools and usage; the proportion actually receiving that training was considerably smaller. That gap is not a minor inconvenience. It represents a growing divergence between the tools organisations are deploying and the capability of the people using them, which is, to put it gently, not a recipe for getting the best out of either.

The organisations beginning to close this gap are those that have treated AI literacy as a mainstream learning requirement rather than a specialist interest for the technically curious. Generic awareness sessions have their place, but employees need practical training in the specific tools they use in the specific context of their work, and that requires L&D to move rather more quickly than the traditional annual programme cycle allows.

Development has become part of the offer

Meanwhile, in the talent market, something has been changing that took a while for employers to fully register. Competitive salary remains important, naturally, but research throughout 2024 has consistently shown that employees, and particularly the more capable ones, are placing significant weight on learning and development opportunities when evaluating employers. This is not entirely surprising when you consider the economics: in a labour market where skills can become outdated in the space of a few years, the question of who pays for your ongoing development is not an abstract one. An employer who takes that development seriously is offering something of genuine long-term value.

The corollary is that employers who offer little or nothing in the way of structured development are, in effect, asking people to accept a slower rate of career progression in exchange for a job. Some will accept that trade; the best generally will not. Hence the growing recognition, even in organisations that have historically been somewhat inattentive to L&D, that a credible development offer is a competitive necessity rather than an optional extra.

The shape of the skills demand is changing

The areas of highest skills demand in 2024 were, broadly, those where human adaptability, judgement, and collaboration remain essential alongside technical competence: sustainability practices, digital transformation, data literacy, machine learning, and, notably, agile delivery. The growth in demand for SAFe and Scrum capability is partly a reflection of this. As automation continues to reshape operational roles, the organisations best placed to adapt are those with teams that know how to work iteratively, respond to change, and collaborate across functions. Those are learnable skills, but they require proper structured development rather than a quick online course and an optimistic attitude.

Flexibility in learning is now an expectation, not a feature

One further shift worth noting is the degree to which employees have come to expect the same flexibility in their learning as in their working arrangements. The pandemic normalised remote and hybrid working, and it also normalised remote learning; people became accustomed to accessing development without the need for a train journey or an overnight stay. The organisations still insisting that training can only happen in a room, on a fixed date, at a venue of the organisation's choosing are discovering that this position is harder to sustain than it was in 2019. Moreover, the quality of remote instructor-led delivery has improved considerably; for most programmes, geography is genuinely no longer a barrier.

On the whole, 2024 has been the year in which the arguments for taking L&D seriously finally acquired enough weight to be heard in rooms where they previously struggled to get through the door. Whether that translates into sustained investment or simply a brief moment of attention before next year's budget round remains to be seen. The organisations that treat this as a structural shift rather than a passing trend are likely to find themselves rather better placed going into 2025 than those that do not.

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