Our final group of 10 Thirty Under 30 honorees have a wide variety of accomplishments, from creating patient care training to implementing an organization-wide goal-setting framework and everything in between: 

Faith Beatty, MBA, Learning Program Manager, Progress Residential

Faith has a background in business entrepreneurship and an MBA from Grand Canyon University. Faith brings a unique blend of strategic thinking, creativity, and heart to every initiative she leads. Currently serving as a Program Manager of Leadership Development at Progress Residential, Faith designs and delivers impactful programs that foster growth, collaboration, and purpose-driven leadership. Her experience spans higher education, hospitality, and corporate environments, always with a focus on creating meaningful experiences that uplift individuals and teams. A natural self-starter and lifelong learner, Faith thrives on challenges and is known for her positive energy, thoughtful communication, and commitment to service. Whether she’s facilitating a workshop, mentoring emerging leaders, or building new initiatives from the ground up, Faith shows up each day ready to make a difference.

Angela Parra, Nurse Educator, AdventHealth Littleton  

This past fall, Angela collaborated with an interprofessional team to train staff to take care of intermediate care (IMC) status open heart surgery patients. To train staff, she helped lead a 4-hour class about cardiovascular surgery as well as coordinated orientation shifts in the CVICU for our nurses to get familiar with the nursing care of an open-heart surgery patient. The team has now successfully been caring for IMC status patients for a few months.   

Tyler Snyder, Senior Instructional Designer, PECO, an Exelon Company 

Tyler has experience in the learning and design space across various industries, including healthcare, marketing, technology, and utilities. His work with companies and clients worldwide has allowed him to create trainings that cater to diverse needs for both internal employees and customer learners. Since beginning his professional career in 2015, Tyler has taken on multiple responsibilities throughout the design, development, implementation, and evaluation of numerous projects. This includes developing new employee orientation, curriculum mapping, and simulation implementation, all intended to continuously enhance business functions in alignment with strategic goals and core competencies. 

Jenny Sun, Information Designer II, Intuit 

Jenny first entered the L&D space in 2019 as a contractor intern at Intuit, where her manager recognized her strengths and brought her onto the team to support process visualization. Beyond that, she leveraged her survey writing skills to lead learner feedback loops and design end-of-training surveys, ensuring a data-driven approach to improvement. Within three months, Jenny transitioned into Instructional Design, leading the visual styling, gamification, and overall theme of a high-impact project. Her contributions helped the project exceed its projected NPS score by 120%, demonstrating the power of thoughtful design in enhancing learner engagement and satisfaction. 

Qianhui (Gabrielle) Sun, Instructional Designer, EY 

Qianhui set out to become a product manager in the EdTech space, but without prior industry experience, she stumbled into instructional design instead, which turned out to be a perfect fit. For the past five years, she’s worked as an instructional designer at a Fortune 50 firm, designing global compliance training and upskilling programs that reach over 400,000 employees across service lines such as Tax, Assurance, Strategy and Transactions (SaT), and Go-to-Market. She’s also contributed to internal research initiatives on virtualizing in-person programs, designing for accessibility, and leveraging AI-powered role-play simulations to replicate real-world decision-making in a safe learning environment.  

Harry Tong, Training Content Developer, Brivo 

Harry’s interest in ID became a reality at an immersive English school for adults. There, he saw the need for a teacher onboarding program and created their first digital onboarding course using Storyline, Camtasia, and Vyond. Since starting his first L&D role early last year, he’s spearheaded the development and ongoing management of Brivo’s flagship certification program, which helped increase the company’s revenue by upwards of $4 million year over year. He’s also helped translate the program into five languages, since having a training offering along with our products has made expansion into other regions of the world much smoother. 

Carlos Vazquez, Talent & Academy Facilitator, SoftwareONE 

Carlos has worked in Learning and Development for the past six years, collaborating with internal and external clients. As a trainer and facilitator, he takes pride in his work’s impact on learners and new hires. His expertise lies in supporting new joiners and young talent, ensuring they have a smooth transition during their initial days in a new role or company. This role brings him immense satisfaction and fulfillment. He believes that knowledge is invaluable, and the opportunity to share it should always be celebrated. 

Sundiata Washington, Space and Defense Industrial Engineer, The Boeing Company 

Sundiata served as NAACP president at Tuskegee University and also worked in his hometown of Conyers, GA. He collaborated with the mayor of Tuskegee, AL, to organize an event emphasizing the importance of child literacy. His passion for L&D was also demonstrated during the pandemic when he organized and participated in virtual workshops related to social justice. By collaborating with city leaders, he was able to nonviolently remove a Confederate statue. These experiences taught him how to develop impactful initiatives and measure their success. His goal is to continue to educate my community and aid in the creation of a community of self-liberating people.  

Raluca Weber, Talent Enablement Consultant II, BHG Financial 

Two years ago, Raluca formally transitioned to talent management and spearheaded initiatives that expanded her organization’s development focus beyond leadership to include all employees. Her proudest achievement is launching the company’s first professional development program to help employees assess their current position and map their career aspirations. She also established a structured monthly 1:1 system focusing on performance and growth conversations, created a Performance and Development Hub, and implemented an organization-wide goal-setting framework. These initiatives have provided remote employees with accessible development resources and sustainable systems that deliver learning content in digestible formats suited to our fast-paced environment. 

Faye Xiao, Founder and CEO, Skilt 

Faye’s worked across a wide range of learning environments, from art studios to tech workshops, and taught students from age 5 to adults. What ties all her experiences together is a commitment to making learning approachable and engaging. She often built custom curriculum based on student needs. Her proudest achievement is Skilt, an education startup she founded to help people create structured, day-by-day learning paths using curated resources. Skilt is built for learners who are motivated but overwhelmed, those who don’t know where to start. By turning vague goals into achievable steps, she’s made self-directed learning less paralyzing and more empowering.  

Congratulations to these 10 winners! And a special thanks to all of the 2025 Thirty Under 30 program honorees for inspiring us with your talent.   

The post The Final Reveal: 10 Up-and-Coming L&D Leaders appeared first on Learning Guild.

The second group of 10 Thirty Under 30 honorees features everything from professionals who’ve been interested in L&D since undergrad to those who jumped into the role with no prior experience:

Lexi Danos, Sr. Manager Content Design, 7 Brew Drive Thru Coffee

Lexi has maintained a high-impact onboarding program with a 95% success rate, delivering both live and virtual sessions. She also created a development program for recent college graduates to support early career growth and retention, achieving a 98% retention rate in participants’ first year. She founded and led a Young Professionals Employee Resource Group focused on professional growth and networking to support ongoing development. Her contributions were recognized with the Mile Marker Award (Employee of the Quarter) in 2019 and the HOPE Award in 2021 for fostering inclusivity and living company values.

Ryan Gootar, HR & Training Specialist, National Beverage Corp.

Ryan recently rolled out a new HRIS and training platform at his company. This system allowed Ryan to reimagine how the company delivers training and supports employee growth to build a training strategy that actually worked for people at every level. The new platform has simplified compliance, made learning more accessible, and allowed employees to follow more personalized development paths. Ryan also curated content, created easy-to-follow guides, and ran live training sessions to ensure the transition went smoothly.  

Haley Lewis, Training and Quality Assurance Supervisor, Sky Zone

Before entering L&D, Haley recognized a significant gap in her company’s training process. She had no formal background in training at the time, but started creating training while learning the most effective training methodologies. When the pandemic hit, her company was unprepared for remote work. Haley researched available tools and trained the entire organization on using SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and the remote phone system. That experience led her to earn a Certificate in Instructional Design from the University of Utah in 2021. Since then, she’s built and implemented training programs from the ground up in every role she’s held.

Julia McLane, Learning Experience Designer, Dick’s Sporting Goods

Julia stepped into her first official instructional design role at a company with almost no existing learning framework. There were no course templates, standardized processes, or even consistent documentation for learners. She took the lead in building all the materials needed from the ground up, everything from learner-facing materials and internal documentation to a full course development workflow. She also collaborated closely with subject matter experts to shape content that was both accurate and accessible.  

Isabelle Merlin-Madrigal, Content Specialist, Genentech

Isabelle created a hybrid training model for new hires, which reduced in-person classroom time by 67% while enhancing training effectiveness for over 6,000 students. She created home-recorded modules, uploaded them to the LMS, and monitored completion rates. She also trained Large Language Models (LLMs) to provide precise answers to internal queries to train individuals on their roles, reaching 700 individuals and significantly increasing their knowledge and daily application of AI. Additionally, she championed the launch of innovative AI features in existing internal platforms to enhance efficiency and productivity.

Ana Olivares, Instructional Designer, Pandemuerto

Ana started as an English as a Second Language (ESL) teacher in Mexico, then transitioned to leading one-on-one sessions with adults and young adults. This allowed her to develop a more personalized teaching approach that paved the way for her transition to instructional design. Although she initially didn’t plan to be a teacher, that experience helped her discover a passion for building meaningful learning experiences. In her current role as an instructional designer, she has contributed to the design and development of soft and technical training skills for major companies in Monterrey, such as Cemex and Arca Continental.  

Sydney Oliver, Sr. Learning and Development Specialist, phData

During undergrad, Sydney worked as a research assistant with Dr. Marissa Schuffler, assessing leadership and teamwork issues in virtual teams for NASA, which helped to inform the design of training interventions. After that, she took a gap year with AmeriCorps, serving with the Goodwill Job Connection and United Way of Easley, SC, where she designed financial literacy curricula for children and adults alike. The following year, she pursued a Master’s in Industrial/Organizational Psychology, with an emphasis on organizational development. After completing graduate school, she has gone on to work in talent management, training, and learning and development.

Corryn Rau, Instructional Designer, Northrop Grumman

Corryn taught for 6 years at a progressive school, which did not utilize a standard curriculum. Therefore, she was tasked with creating her own multi-year, project-based curriculum that highly engaged students and went on to perform well on a variety of standardized exams. At the end of the last school year, Corryn transitioned from teaching in the classroom setting to an L&D role in the corporate setting. In her new role, she has developed effective “train the trainer” materials that provide technical subject matter experts with best practices and tools for leading effective and engaging training sessions.

Lexi Redmond, Manager, Organizational Development, Dine Brands Global

Lexi’s graduate school research findings have been shared in articles, conference presentations, and online blogs. She has also consulted in the organizational learning and development space for various industries. While part of the Maternal Telehealth Access Project in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, she worked to address research gaps with underrepresented populations and highlight the importance of including people with lived experience and utilizing storytelling in medical training. In her current work at Dine Brands, she helps cultivate an environment where our team members can grow and thrive through engagement, belonging, and organizational development efforts.

Gabriella Roman, Community Programs Manager, Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

Gabriella has been in the education field for more than 11 years in roles such as serving as a virtual educator for international students and managing educational programs within museums. Her primary mission has been to develop accessible educational resources tailored for students and community members in museum settings. Gabriella has also presented at the Florida Association of Museums on the topic, “Outside Museum Walls: Community Outreach and Education” which emphasized the importance of museums reassessing their educational tools and resources, while fostering creative strategies to build meaningful connections with community members.

Congratulations to these 10 winners! Be on the lookout for one more article that will announce the final 10 honorees. 

The post Meet 10 Rising Stars Shaping the Future of L&D appeared first on Learning Guild.

New advances in measuring & verifying skills
AI has helped make significant strides in skills assessment. Here are three ways that L&D is very close to being able to quantify at scale people’s abilities: 

1. Skills used to be assessed with a quiz or by having someone watch someone else to ensure they could do a task. But new data from all elements of work technology, not just learning tech, can now be used to help L&D professionals assess and understand the workforce’s skills. For example, data streams can be brought in from the Microsoft suite and frontline technology, like the technology drivers use when driving the truck, to help L&D understand people’s skills and make decisions based on it. 
2. Technology is moving to include skill verification. Not only has tech started verifying that employees have a skill, but also to what extent they have that skill. This information opens many doors for L&D to improve training, hiring, and upskilling. 
3. Data isn’t just staying inside the learning and development department anymore. Tech vendors are providing dashboards to help employees understand what skills they have, what skills they need, and where their skills are compared to their peers so they can take more ownership in their learning. 
    

The rise of “relationship tech”
Did you know learning technology can help build or enhance relationships between people in the workplace? Here are some examples of how it’s being used:

1. Skills-based peer teaching tech matches employees based on the skills they have that others need to learn. For example, if someone needs to create a macro in Excel, they can find somebody in the organization who knows how to make it and can teach their peers how to do it. 
2. Tech-enabled human coaching helps human coaches prepare questions and summarize information for coaching sessions. It can also help with coach matching to ensure that employees are aligned with the right coach.
3. Bots for self-reflection provide users with hints to stop and think about their actions before moving forward. For example, before a boss sends an email to their employee at 11:30 p.m., the bot would ask if the boss really wants to send the email, given the late hour. 
4. Adaptive practice allows humans to rehearse tough conversations and get realistic responses. This can be a critical tool for managers, especially new managers, who need to give feedback to their employees.  
    

The next wave of content creation
Many L&D professionals already use technology to make outlines, generate ideas, translate content, add subtitles, and create courses. However, technology is also being used for content creation in these new and creative ways:

1. Creating personalized learning was a very time-intensive, manual process. But now AI can help tag content and put together learning paths in innovative ways that we haven’t seen before. Some software can even create personalized courses to help answer specific employee questions. 
2. Current tech can also create systems training that sits on top of the system itself and regenerates the video every time the system changes. This allows the L&D professional to avoid recreating the course whenever the system changes because the course automatically updates. 
    

The post Three Technologies that are Reshaping the L&D Landscape appeared first on Learning Guild.

Maggie Bodner, Learning & Development Manager, BrandsMart USA

Maggie developed her organization’s first-ever new hire program, despite the company being around for nearly 40 years. This initiative provided a structured onboarding experience, ensuring new team members felt supported and prepared from day one. As the only L&D team member at BrandsMart, this was a particularly big lift. Additionally, she played a key role in opening two new stores, creating comprehensive training plans and content for every position within the store. This involved designing role-specific training to ensure a smooth launch and immediate operational success, which had never been done before at BrandsMart USA.  

Faith Brown, Operations Trainer, Westgate Resorts

Faith’s journey with L&D began organically, stemming from a natural desire to train, support, and mentor colleagues. This passion was confirmed in her proudest achievement: leading the company-wide training initiative for the new front office and back-of-house operating system. This involved designing and implementing a learning program that ensured a smooth transition for over 150 employees. She used a variety of learning methods, including developing SME’s for local and national locations and hosting interactive workshop sessions, resulting in a significantly reduced learning curve and minimal disruption to operations.  

Katie Buckner, Specialist, Organizational & Leadership Development, MedVet

Katie completely redesigned the leadership curriculum for all managers, directors, and VPs to ensure practical and relevant content for people leaders. She also manages the organization’s LMS and has overseen the development of 200 LMS courses. Katie also converted in-person supervisor leadership trainings into a fully online, four-hour LMS curriculum. She has also streamlined compliance training enrollment and new hire onboarding. Currently, she’s leading the migration and implementation process of an updated LMS.  

Sabrina Cervantes Villa, Human-Centered Design Specialist, Global Learning Experience, Align Technology

Sabrina created the virtual training guide for the Arizona Academic Decathlon during the pandemic. Built in Google Slides, the guide used role-based navigation and interactive checklists to support volunteers and participants across varying levels of digital literacy. Most recently, she led the redesign of Align Technology’s global L&D content strategy to be fully data-informed, ensuring the program was aligned to both organizational priorities and the evolving needs of the 23,000+ employees. By integrating user experience methodology, she created a more targeted and meaningful learner experience, which was recognized with the 2025 Excellence in Data-Driven Learning Programs award from OpenSesame.

Ashley Cooks, Sr. Instructional Designer, The Home Depot

Ashley has held learning and development roles in oil and gas, tech, manufacturing, and retail. During her time in manufacturing, she encountered unique challenges that shaped her approach to training. These experiences led Ashley to develop presentations on Creating Training for a Multigenerational Workforce, Multicultural Workplaces, and Lower-Education Adults. She’s conducted benchmarking studies on cross-generational learning preferences, cultural adaptation in workplace training, and accessible instructional design. These insights have informed her consulting work and allowed her to bridge knowledge gaps in diverse workplace settings.

Nakul Grover, Manager, Learning Experience Design, Takeda Pharmaceuticals U.S.A., Inc.

At Takeda, Nakul works on the Global Learning team, driving capability-building for 50,000+ employees across 12 languages. He’s enhanced learner experience by integrating game-based learning, where learners practice skills in immersive spaces like virtual sushi bars or spaceships. He’s also crafting Takeda’s prompt-writing framework, collaborating with tech SMEs, and delivering a TEDx talk. Amid the structure of an industry like pharmaceuticals, he’s embraced creativity, bold design, and fresh thinking to ensure every learning experience is impactful, vibrant, and uniquely human while redefining traditional boundaries.

Mickailynn Holman, Specialist – Training & Instructional Design, Maximus

Mickailynn began her career as a training coordinator in 2021, then transitioned to more strategic and creative work in an instructional design position. In that role, she has improved knowledge management within a multi-department organization by co-developing a SharePoint hub to enhance accessibility and collaboration. She also streamlined the organization’s new hire onboarding process by updating content and introducing self-service resources, resulting in a two-week reduction in onboarding time. Additionally, Mickailynn helped refine her team’s review process for quality checking materials and auditing updates, as well as developing an approvals process to facilitate communication and streamline content edits.

Rachel Jennings, Sr. Project Manager, Capital One

In her first role, Rachel led a working group to develop a universal curriculum for early career programs across multiple job families, addressing a business need for a shared onboarding experience to build foundational career skills. She collaborated with learning experts to identify core competencies, streamline content, and create a scalable solution impacting 10 programs and over 1,000 new associates. In her current role, Rachel has developed an internal speakers bureau and manages a team of contracted instructional designers supporting learning content and design across the organization.

Mercedez Jones, Learning Experience Architect Team Leader, Wintrust Financial Corporation

Fresh out of college, Mercedez landed at ZS Associates as an assistant to the Chief HR Officer. One day, the L&D Coordinator quit unexpectedly, just two weeks before a major training program. With no background in L&D but a knack for organization, she volunteered to step in. She coordinated week-long new hire trainings and three-day promotional trainings, ensuring everything ran smoothly. Mercedez had never worked harder, but had also never felt more energized by work. She took on the L&D Coordinator role permanently, and from that moment on, immersed herself in L&D.  

Moksha Khanna, Special Education Teacher, University of Chicago Charter School

As a Lead Teaching Artist at UCAN Academy, Moksha designed and delivered innovative arts education programs that fostered creativity and engagement among diverse learners. She developed a curriculum integrating social justice themes, empowering students to explore their identities and societal issues through art. This program increased participation by 25% and was recognized at the Illinois Art Education Association Conference. As a Heritage Months Coordinator at SAIC, Moksha created community-driven programs celebrating cultural diversity, increasing engagement by 25%. These initiatives involved cross-functional collaboration, ensuring inclusivity and accessibility.  

Congratulations to these 10 winners! Keep an eye out for future articles announcing the remaining Thirty under 30 honorees. 

The post Meet 10 of the Most Promising L&D Professionals Under 30 appeared first on Learning Guild.

Embrace technology at your organization

Attendees were wowed by the scope of technology that exists today and how much of it they were unaware of before the event. One attendee even said, “There’s a lot that I don’t know and a lot that I can know.”  

Another attendee encouraged organizations to embrace this new technology and incorporate it into training without fear. “That’s where we are right now in this industry,” the attendee stated as evidence that more companies need to be using the latest innovative technology in their learning.

How attendees are embracing technology

While there are plenty of examples of how DevLearn attendees are using technology, here are a few that we heard from the attendees we interviewed:

• One attendee we spoke to was in the early stages of developing a Learning Management System (LMS) and was looking to vet out a system and choose the correct one for corporate strategy. Aligning learning technology with business goals, as this attendee did, is always key to gaining stakeholder buy-in for purchasing a new technology.
• Another was looking to make Storyline courses more interactive. This attendee was on the right track, as making courses more interactive helps with learner engagement and retention.
• The final attendee we talked to was exploring how to integrate artificial intelligence (AI) into current workflows to optimize current tasks. There were a lot more attendees using AI as well, and this article has the details on how they’re leveraging it.

We hope that you’ll take our attendees’ advice to heart and brainstorm how your organization can embrace technology this year. See the full interview:

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At the 2024 DevLearn Conference & Expo, we asked attendees about their AI use and discovered that it’s being used in a variety of ways:

Writing scripts & code

Some attendees found AI to be a time-saver in writing code for projects that they are working on. Also, they mentioned using AI to write scripts that they’re using to make learning. They admit that slight alterations might need to be made to the code or scripts, but they have still found it to be a time-saver as opposed to starting from scratch.

Having a learning hub or resource portal

Attendees also mentioned using AI to create a learning hub or resource portal that can help their learners find the information they need. One hub was designed to help attendees find the training that they wanted to take, and another was to provide employees with guidance on how to use AI itself.

Evaluating data

One attendee in the healthcare industry has been experimenting with using AI to evaluate outcomes and compare them to public health data. The attendee is using AI search tools to automate the essential task of gathering data needed by the accreditation boards.

Assisting in research

While many attendees mentioned using AI to help them generate or refine ideas, one in particular called AI a free research assistant. The attendee appreciated putting ideas into AI and getting an immediate response about new things to consider rather than having to wait days or weeks to hear back.

Creating content

One attendee mentioned using AI to generate content for courses, including potentially using it for video in courses. In my interview with Diane Elkins, she also mentioned using AI to generate images in seconds.

Not currently using it

If you’re not using AI yet, you’re not alone. Multiple attendees said that their organizations weren’t using AI yet. They were waiting on approval to start using AI, but cited cybersecurity hoops as barriers to getting approval.

See the video responses:

The post How Your Peers are Using AI appeared first on Learning Guild.

After the award presentation, I caught up with Diane to discuss how it all began, what she’s working on now, and where she thinks L&D is going in the future.

L&D wasn’t the original plan
Initially, Diane wanted to pursue a career in advertising, so she earned degrees in graphic design, English, and marketing. However, she found herself in a situation where she couldn’t work in her chosen field. Instead, she took a job writing resumes, which eventually led her to a role training others on job-search techniques.

Finding purpose in training
Though Diane eventually worked in advertising, it didn’t fulfill her the way training did. “At the end of the day, I hope to help somebody do their job better. And if people know how to do their job well, everybody wins. And that’s a great reason to get out of bed every day,” she reflected.

Diane’s global impact
Her passion for training led her to co-found Artisan Learning, a custom learning design firm. What started as a partnership between her and business partner Desiree Pender two decades ago has blossomed into a company with 24 employees and clients like the American Red Cross. 

“I know that when a volunteer goes to help out at a shelter after a hurricane, that volunteer’s taking training that I wrote. And that’s pretty cool,” Elkins shared.

She has Mixed feelings on AI
Diane has been actively exploring how artificial intelligence (AI) can elevate L&D. “I have really mixed feelings about it,” she admitted. 

While she finds AI’s graphic capabilities to be a game changer, especially for presentations, she’s more hesitant about the writing side, since the copy it produces can be wordy. 

Despite her reservations about AI’s current limitations, she’s optimistic about its potential to improve accessibility and grade critical thinking skills accurately, a challenge that has plagued eLearning for years. 

“I’m really excited about how it can make us better, but I’m a little worried about how it can make us worse,” Diane cautioned.

Looking ahead at the future of L&D
Diane sees many opportunities for L&D to further embrace accessibility. “Everybody deserves the chance to get better at their job. And everyone means everyone,” she said. 

Elkins went on to give examples of people who can’t use their mouse because of rotator cuff injury or can’t see, each of whom needs to be accounted for when creating training. 

While Diane has seen notable strides made in the last four years, she believes there is still more to be done. “People are talking about it, people are caring about it, the tools are being better about it, but there’s still more room to grow.”

See the full interview with Diane: 

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