Tuesday, December 9, 2025
What is learning and development? The complete guide for 2026
The skills your team needs today will be 68% different by 2030. That's not a typo - and it's not a distant problem. According to Microsoft and LinkedIn research, generative AI is accelerating the rate of skills disruption faster than anyone predicted.
For L&D professionals, this creates an uncomfortable reality: the training programs you're building right now may be obsolete before they're finished.
Learning and development has always been about preparing people for the future. But the future has never moved this fast.
What is learning and development?
Learning and development (L&D) is the systematic process of building employee capabilities to drive individual and organizational performance. It encompasses everything from onboarding new hires to developing future leaders—and everything in between.
The distinction between "learning" and "development" matters:
- Learning is acquiring knowledge, skills, or attitudes through instruction, experience, or study
- Development is the long-term growth that helps employees master skills over time and prepare for future challenges
If training is about the present, development is about the future.
L&D teams typically manage programs across several categories:
- Onboarding: Getting new employees productive quickly
- Skills training: Building specific technical or soft skills
- Compliance training: Meeting regulatory and legal requirements
- Leadership development: Preparing high-potential employees for management roles
- Career development: Creating pathways for employee growth and retention
How L&D has evolved: A century of change
The classroom era (early 1900s–1980s)
Corporate training began as an extension of formal education. Employees gathered in classrooms, instructors lectured, and learning was measured by attendance and test scores.
This approach worked when jobs were stable and skills had long shelf lives. A factory worker in 1950 could learn a process once and use it for decades.
The eLearning revolution (1990s–2000s)
The internet changed everything. Suddenly, training could scale beyond physical classrooms. Learning Management Systems (LMS) let companies deliver standardized content to thousands of employees simultaneously.
But eLearning came with trade-offs. Completion rates plummeted. Employees clicked through modules without engaging. The convenience of digital delivery often came at the cost of actual learning.
The microlearning shift (2010s)
As attention spans shortened and mobile devices proliferated, L&D teams embraced bite-sized content. Five-minute videos replaced hour-long courses. Just-in-time learning replaced scheduled training sessions.
The focus shifted from "pushing" content to employees toward "pulling" learning when and where it was needed.
The AI transformation (2020s and beyond)
Today, we're in the middle of another fundamental shift. Traditional L&D models simply can't keep pace with how quickly skills requirements are changing.
Gartner found that 85% of business leaders expect a dramatic surge in skills development needs over the next three years. Yet most L&D teams are still operating with yesterday's tools and approaches.
Why traditional L&D is failing
The problem isn't effort—it's speed.
By the time most organizations identify a skills gap, design training content, pilot it, revise it, and roll it out, the gap has already shifted. SHRM recently declared that "training is dead" and called for a new model: real-time upskilling.
The core issues with traditional L&D:
- Content creation takes too long: Developing a single hour of eLearning can take 40–300 hours
- One-size-fits-all doesn't work: Generic training ignores individual skill gaps and learning styles
- Knowledge lives in silos: Subject matter experts have valuable insights but no scalable way to share them
- Measurement is fuzzy: Completion rates don't equal competence
How AI is reshaping learning and development
Artificial intelligence addresses many of L&D's core bottlenecks:
Personalized learning at scale
AI can analyze individual skill gaps and recommend targeted learning paths—something impossible to do manually for large workforces. Instead of everyone taking the same compliance training, each employee gets content calibrated to what they actually need to learn.
Accelerated content creation
What once took months can now happen in days. AI tools can transform raw materials—documents, presentations, videos, expert interviews—into polished learning content without massive production budgets.
Platforms like Jellypod, for example, accept over 70 file types and convert them into professional podcast episodes, turning that dusty product manual or recorded town hall into engaging audio content in minutes.
Just-in-time delivery
AI-powered chatbots and assistants can answer questions and provide guidance exactly when employees need it, not three weeks later in a scheduled training session.
Knowledge capture from experts
One of L&D's persistent challenges is extracting knowledge from busy subject matter experts. New tools make it easier to capture, structure, and distribute expert insights without requiring SMEs to become full-time content creators. Voice cloning technology takes this further—an expert can record a short sample, and AI can generate unlimited training content in their voice, scaling their reach across the organization without scaling their time commitment.
The rise of audio learning in L&D
Among the emerging formats gaining traction in corporate learning, audio stands out for several reasons:
- Accessibility: Employees can learn during commutes, workouts, or downtime
- Engagement: Conversational formats feel less like "training" and more like learning from a colleague
- Production efficiency: Audio content is faster and cheaper to produce than video
- SME-friendly: Experts can share knowledge through conversation rather than creating slide decks
Internal podcasts have become particularly popular for L&D teams. They're cost-effective, easy to update, and work well for distributed and remote teams.
Tools like Jellypod are making internal podcasts practical for L&D teams of any size. The platform lets teams create professional training podcasts using AI hosts, clone subject matter expert voices to scale their knowledge, and produce content in 25+ languages for global workforces.
L&D teams are using Jellypod for onboarding series that new hires can consume during their first week, compliance updates that employees actually listen to, leadership communications that feel personal rather than corporate, and microlearning episodes that reinforce key skills. Built-in analytics show which episodes resonate and where employees drop off—giving L&D teams the feedback loop they've always lacked.
And because episodes created on Jellypod can distribute automatically to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and internal platforms, there's no friction between creating content and getting it to employees.
Building an AI-ready L&D strategy
For L&D leaders preparing for this shift, a few principles stand out:
- Start with the skills that matter most. Not every skill needs AI-powered training. Focus your investments on capabilities that are changing fastest or have the highest business impact.
- Embrace new formats. Your employees are already consuming podcasts, short videos, and AI-generated content in their personal lives. Meet them where they are.
- Capture expert knowledge now. Your most experienced employees won't be around forever. Build systems to extract and preserve their insights before they walk out the door. Tools like Jellypod that clone voices and convert conversations into structured content make this easier than ever—your retiring VP of Engineering can leave behind a library of wisdom that trains the next generation.
- Measure what matters. Move beyond completion rates to track actual skill development and business outcomes.
The future of L&D
Learning and development has always been about bridging the gap between where employees are and where they need to be. What's changed is the size of that gap and how quickly it's moving.
The L&D teams that thrive will be the ones that embrace AI not as a threat but as a tool—one that finally lets them move at the speed the business requires.
The skills your team needs are changing. The question is whether your L&D strategy is changing with them.
