Learning & Development Trends and Transformations Insights Report 2025

Latest Top 10 Trends and Challenges in Learning & Development

2025 is shaping up to be a year of immense change across all industries and sectors, with Learning & Development no exception. Regime change in the US as well as other nations is leading to profound cultural shifts within organisations and wider society.

Technological disruption over the past few years has been unprecedented. AI is the hottest trend in L&D, with AI and GenAI being widely used in people’s professional and personal lives. Training, upskilling and reskilling people to harness these technologies safely and productively will be top of the agenda for every organisation.

According to the World Economic Forum, half of today’s global workforce needs to upskill or reskill to stay relevant, but “the skills market is not fit for purpose”. The WEF believes government needs to play a role in orchestrating this training to resolve skills market challenges. A failure to do so will cost trillions in global GDP.

Skills shortages remain particularly severe in Australia, which ranks fourth worldwide for talent deficits. According to Jobs and Skills Australia, “occupations with a gender-skewed workforce were more likely to be in shortage”, such as developer programmers. Australia’s technology workforce passed one million in 2024, and it’s estimated that 1.3 million tech workers will be needed by 2030 to meet industry demand. Relying on new graduates and migrants won’t be enough, instead the existing workforce needs to embrace lifelong learning.

A key challenge is predicting exactly which skills will be needed, and where they will be needed. AI has a role to play here in workforce planning, through predictive analytics and forecasting future skills needs.

Australian employers and employees combined invest more than $12 billion in training annually, but research indicates that the rate of participation in work-related training has declined by 14% since 2007. For those participating, average hours spent in training have also declined. The top obstacles include “too much work” and “no time”.

To identify the top priorities and challenges for the Australian L&D sector in 2025, we interviewed industry leaders across a range of sectors to get their insight and perspective.