We often focus on AI for efficiency gains. But for the 61 million American adults (or 1 in 4) with a disability, AI offers something far more vital: the ability to participate fully. Those who are differently abled represent “the world’s largest minority,” and they, along with underserved populations, face systemic barriers. This report moves beyond the hype to show how AI is transforming these obstacles into inclusive, accessible experiences for everyone. 

Key Takeaways:

• The business of inclusion is booming, with the U.S. AI in accessibility market reaching $1.43 Billion and projected to grow at a 24.4% CAGR, driven largely by Natural Language Processing (NLP). 

• AI serves as a crucial bridge for diverse groups, delivering personalized solutions for physical and cognitive disabilities as well as providing equity for underserved, low-income, and rural populations. 

• The future of accessibility requires vigilance and human oversight to combat data bias and a current lack of representation in AI design, which only 7% of surveyed users feel is adequate. 

Download your free copy to explore the future of inclusive technology and its immense market potential. 

The post AI & Accessibility appeared first on Learning Guild.

This session shows how L&D and enablement leaders are using Vyond to turn those challenges into wins. You’ll see how:

• Anyone: anyone can create videos that help Sales cut onboarding time, CS reduce churn, and Compliance pass audits.
• Any Style makes the difference: Matching the right video style to the right problem, avatars for roleplays, motion graphics for compliance, branded templates for CS onboarding, drives impact without adding headcount.
• Anywhere means inside your existing stack: G suite, slack, or your LMS. Vyond delivers enterprise-ready AI, with translations and brand governance built in.

You’ll leave with practical fast facts, short examples you can replicate, and a clear playbook for proving ROI inside your org.

During this session, you will learn:

• How to connect learning content to measurable business outcomes.
• How to make AI usable at scale= enterprise-ready, brand-safe, and integrated.
• How to deliver value with fewer resources by using the right style in the right place.

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iSpring’s latest research across 150+ L&D professionals in North America and Europe identified three clear team profiles: Isolated Executors, Direction Seekers, and Metric Masters — the few who confidently prove ROI and influence strategy.

In this session, Holly Owens will share what separates these groups, highlight the main barriers that hold L&D back, and walk you through real examples, where tracking the right metrics like time-to-proficiency and retention proved direct revenue growth.

You’ll leave with full understanding of the steps every team can take to start speaking the language of business: from proxy metrics and setting goals that matter to choosing measurable KPIs, and showing performance impact with the right LMS setup.

Join if you want to see where your team stands now and join the select few professionals globally that have passed the crisis stage, now enjoying full trust and the peace of mind of an irreplaceable, strategic role.

During this session, you will learn:

• How to quickly assess whether your current reporting puts your L&D team at risk.
• The key patterns that separate high-impact teams from those stuck in “support mode.”
• Small changes and techniques for connecting learning initiatives to measurable business outcomes.
• How to use proxy metrics to make ROI visible without complex financial modeling.
• Tried-and-true ways to build credibility with executives through communication.

The post L&D ROI in 2025: the Crisis, the Shift, and the Way Out appeared first on Learning Guild.

The modern workplace has changed forever. Traditional job titles and static descriptions are no longer sufficient to meet the dynamic needs of business. The future of work is not defined by roles, but by agile, transferable skills. 

Is your L&D strategy equipped to navigate this skills-first revolution?

This eBook provides the definitive guide for practitioners to move beyond outdated models and become the strategic driver of workforce adaptability and growth. The shift is happening right now to the broader challenge of identifying durable skills for jobs that don’t exist yet. 

This eBook is your roadmap for seizing this opportunity, providing L&D with the strategies to: 

• Identify and develop the skills your organization will need tomorrow, not just today. 

• Get clear, actionable definitions for key concepts: Skills Mobility, Skill Stacking, Hard vs. Soft Skills, and Durable Skills. 

• Discover how L&D can leverage skills audits and AI-powered skills ontologies to align internal talent with critical business needs. 

What You Will Learn Inside 

1. Focus on application-based learning over theory to address individual needs and skill gaps. 

2. Conduct skills audits and use a mix of formal, informal, and AI-driven inference from HR data to pinpoint existing strengths and deficits. 

3. Teach employees to articulate their own skills, build better profiles, and navigate internal talent marketplaces. 

4. Intentionally build foundational skills (like collaboration and problem-solving) into all instructional design. 

5. Use AI for predictive analytics and personalized learning, but maintain human interaction for critical “soft” skill development. 

The post Skills Matching: What Is L&D’s Role?  appeared first on Learning Guild.

So why do so many leaders hesitate to move on? It’s rarely because they think the system is great. It’s because change feels messy. The sunk costs, the thought of migrating data, the worry that the next platform will be just as disappointing. It’s easier to limp along than to risk a big switch. Until it isn’t.

This white paper dissects all these issues. It looks at common complaints and issues and offers remedies to help you. And if you decide to move it in gives a practical step-by-step guide in involving your whole team, getting management approval, and how to run an RFP. Real practical advice written by industry leaders who have been through it and come out the other side. And the grass can be a lot greener!

The post LMS Fail? How to Recognize a Failing LMS and Remedy It appeared first on Learning Guild.

This session shares key items you should learn to amp up your business acumen to superstar level, in a simple checklist format! We will also brainstorm strategies on where to find that information in our own organizations.

In this session you will:

• Explore what increased business acumen truly means for L&D professionals.
• Review a checklist of critical business acumen to master.
• Learn several strategies to find the business acumen information in your own organization.

The post Become a Business Acumen Superstar! appeared first on Learning Guild.

Join ELB Learning’s Strategy & Execution (StratX) team for this interactive session where we’ll explore how to build high-performance sales teams with data-driven design, clear enablement priorities, and measurable business outcomes. We’ll unpack new performance benchmarks from SalesExecution’s SPS Index—revealing how leading companies outperform on quota attainment, pipeline velocity, and seller engagement.

• Diagnose common breakdowns in your sales performance engine.
• Map competencies that correlate with success in today’s buying landscape.
• Align enablement strategy to revenue-critical moments in the customer journey.
• Coach managers to become behavior multipliers, not just meeting schedulers.

We wrap up with a behind-the-scenes look at ELB Learning’s new StratX Enablement practice, and invite you to book a complimentary performance diagnostic to explore opportunities for impact in your own sales organization.

The post Sales Enablement 2.0: Where Learning Meets Performance in a Disrupted Market appeared first on Learning Guild.

The post Demo Days – Boosting Engagement and Business Results using  Docebo appeared first on Learning Guild.

Establishing a plan for managing and distributing training content is essential to ensuring your products are properly understood, marketed, and sold. Creating a customer education program – also known as an extended enterprise approach – helps remove the friction of accessing training, ensures your external partners are well-informed, and can provide insights into how learners are using your content and course effectiveness.

In this eBook, you’ll discover:

• How implementing a customer education program can increase brand awareness, adoption, and sales.
• What are the technical considerations when you take your training to your partners.
• The benefits of distributing your content externally.
• What technologies can make the process easier.
• How other organizations have successfully implemented a partner education program.

The post Launching Your Customer Education Program: Technical Considerations for Taking Training to Your Partners appeared first on Learning Guild.

“Stakeholders don’t know whether HR and L&D are worth investing in.”

This candid statement from a good friend, and fellow learning enthusiast, captures a central challenge L&D professionals have faced for decades. Many organizational leaders struggle to see the direct connection between learning initiatives and business outcomes. When budgets tighten, HR and L&D departments are often first on the chopping block—precisely because this connection remains unclear.

In my research and work as an internal learning leader and consultant, I’ve consistently found that alignment is the single factor that differentiates high-performing, mature learning departments from everyone else. As Ingrid Guerra-Lopez wisely notes, “The value of alignment is not in achieving perfection, but having habits and processes in place to make striving for alignment an ongoing practice.”

In this article, I’ll share three powerful alignment tactics I regularly apply in my work that can help us all incrementally move from being a cost center to a strategic organizational asset.

The starting point: Misalignment & missed opportunities

Many learning departments struggle with relevance and with keeping pace with the ever-changing needs and priorities of their business. Additionally, the learning function in the average organization often boasts high learning satisfaction scores, yet participants rarely apply what they learn back on the job.

This disconnect perpetuates the cost-center narrative, due to wasted resources on unused learning, missed opportunities to develop critical capabilities, and growing frustration from business leaders who see learning as a compliance necessity rather than a strategic advantage. To interrupt this cost-center narrative and improve our learning team’s relevance and overall contribution to the organization, we can lean on three simple yet powerful alignment tactics.

Tactic #1: Aligning with core learning value propositions

While you may know Robert Brinkerhoff for being the brain behind the Success Case measurement methodology, he also co-created an equally useful framework, the 6 Learning Value Propositions.  In this framework, he posits that all the varieties of training, learning, and development we create can be categorized into one the following buckets of value.

1. Supporting job performance: Helping employees perform effectively on the job.
2. Providing a talent pipeline: Building competencies to enable a smoother succession of internal employees into higher roles.
3. New strategy execution: Nurturing workplace behaviors to facilitate organizational change and strategies.
4. Emergency performance: Preparing staff to respond to emergency situations, prioritizing safety and damage control.
5. Regulatory requirements: Ensuring personnel are compliant with industry-specific rules and regulations.
6. Staff benefits: Providing access to learning and growth opportunities as a competitive employee advantage.

Anytime I take on a new learning initiative, I first identify which of the six value propositions my initiative aligns with. The benefit of this exercise is creating a common language to speak with my team and stakeholders about the value associated with our investment in learning.

If you are one of the many people who feel like sourcing the business goals and metrics associated with training is like pulling teeth—a very painful process. You’ll be relieved to know that this framework is also very useful to help you easily align your learning initiatives with strategic organizational outcomes—without even asking stakeholders for their input (that comes later).

In Dr. Will Thalheimer’s latest book, The CEO’s Guide to Training, eLearning, and Work, he emphasizes how the learning function (when grounded in the core principles of learning science) actually contributes to the organization’s competitive advantage. Describing the value of our learning initiatives using language that business leaders understand helps us to break out of the historical silos that the learning function often finds itself in. Yet, we must take this alignment tactic one step further to get the full advantage of Brinkerhoff and Brittan-Catlin’s learning value propositions.

Next, we must connect the value proposition for our new learning initiative to specific metrics that matter most to stakeholders. While we could argue there are many metrics that business leaders care about, I believe there are only a handful of organizational metrics that we can or should align our initiatives to.

While data is an incredible asset for guiding our investments in learning, more data is not always more valuable. Below are the organizational metrics that are most relevant for each of our Learning Value Propositions.

1. Supporting job performance: revenue and mission fulfillment
2. Providing a talent pipeline: employee retention and net profit
3. New strategy execution: revenue, mission fulfillment, and market share
4. Emergency performance: net profit
5. Regulatory requirements: net profit
6. Staff benefits: employee retention

Here’s an example of what this alignment tactic might look like in practice. I like to create a sentence that connects the learning initiative to the most relevant learning value proposition and to the most appropriate organizational metric(s). This sentence is then something I present to my learning team and stakeholders and ask for their reaction. This doesn’t need to be a formal presentation. You can simply send your statement in an email and ask if you’ve captured the desired outcomes of the program correctly (or not), and what they’d like you to change before you dive more into the development process.

Example statement: The purpose of our customer service onboarding program is to support job performance, helping our customer service team to perform effectively on the job (insert appropriate key performance indicators if you already know the key performance indicators the team should be accomplishing) and sustain or improve the team’s contribution to organizational revenue.

This simple alignment exercise changes our conversations with stakeholders. Instead of talking about inputs and outputs of learning, that are all costs to the organization, such as time spent in learning, learning completion rates, and satisfaction scores, we started discussing the outcomes and results of learning that contributed to business metrics they cared about.

When you apply this exercise to your list of current learning initiatives, if you find initiatives that are difficult to align with one learning value proposition and the corresponding organizational metrics, it might be an initiative that is costing more to the organization than it contributes.

Tactic #2: Creating alignment through strategic use of data

According to a recent Forbes article describing the value of data literacy and using data to make informed decisions, the benefits for organizations include:   

• A common language among teams and departments
• Increased collaboration
• Increased curiosity, creativity, and innovation
• Cost savings                                                    

These outcomes explain why data literacy distinguishes high-performing, mature organizations from the rest. Organizations that are data literate and consistently use data to make informed decisions are more aligned. Department leaders are aligned. Communication is aligned, and fewer information silos exist. Employee performance is aligned with KPIs. Learning opportunities are aligned with employee and operational performance gaps. Alignment strengthens the contribution L&D makes to the business and individual employees.

Thus, the next tactic we can apply to improve the relevance and value of our learning function is to translate our data into value. While being data literate can mean many things, in its simplest form, data literacy is the ability to use data to make strategic decisions, while being confident that your data is trustworthy (aka accurate).  There are two data practices I use regularly to help me translate my data into value.

Thoughtful data sourcing

Where do you go to get data and insights on the needs and priorities of department leaders? I’ve found that building relationships (or even a team) of inter-departmental leaders is essential to ensure that my sources of data on people problems and opportunities are trustworthy. Before designing any program, I ensure my team partners with the relevant department leaders to understand their needs and priorities.

Building surveys that provide actionable insights

I believe survey fatigue is the direct result of poor survey design. If the surveys we create don’t provide data we can use to take action, they are totally useless. One question has really helped me to refine (and shorten) my surveys. This is not a question we include in our surveys, it is a question we ask for each of the survey questions we create. Pick any multiple-choice question in your survey. Then, imagine that 50% of respondents answered option A. What does that tell you? How will you use this information to improve our program? If the insights you get from this exercise don’t yield actionable insights, either eliminate the question or change it!

Tactic #3: Aligning expectations from the start

Perhaps the most significant change we can make to boost learning alignment is changing how we respond to training requests. This approach is something I learned from my good friend and colleague, Chris Taylor, founder of Actionable.io. Chris suggests that instead of immediately saying “yes” to every request, we say “Yes I’d love to help, and… Can I ask you a couple of questions to kick off the project?”

1. “What do you expect will change after participants complete this program?”
2. “How are the behaviors you want to change aligned with strategic priorities?”
3. “What is the fastest way to facilitate this change?”

This approach to responding to training requests often reveals that that training isn’t always the best solution. In some cases, job aids, mentoring, or workplace environment changes proved more effective. This approach also reveals if our stakeholders really want to invest in behavior change, or if they simply need information to be distributed for compliance purposes. This perspective helps us to invest the proper resources in our initiatives – as information distribution and compliance programs require far less resources than behavior change initiatives.

Conclusion & critical action steps

Alignment isn’t a one-time effort but an ongoing process requiring constant attention and adaptation. By implementing these three alignment tactics, learning professionals can transform how their organizations view and value learning. Instead of being seen as a necessary expense, learning becomes recognized as what it truly is—a strategic asset driving organizational performance and success. The action steps below will help you experience the alignment advantage for yourself!

Aligning with core learning value propositions:

1. Map each learning program to one of the six value propositions
2. Identify which business metrics each value proposition impacts
3. Communicate your learning value proposition to your team and stakeholders and ask them to confirm you’ve accurately captured the results and value the program should provide to the organization
4. Develop processes to maintain alignment as business priorities shift

Creating alignment through strategic use of data:

1. Foster cross-functional collaboration when designing learning solutions
2. Refine measurement approaches to generate actionable insights
3. Implement data triangulation to verify learning outcomes
4. Build data literacy skills across your learning team

Aligning expectations from the start:

1. Determine if behavior change matters to the stakeholder
2. Explore alternative solutions beyond traditional training
3. Set realistic expectations about resources needed for behavior change

Join us at the Learning Leadership Conference & explore data in L&D

Don’t miss Alaina Szlachta’s session, Align Your Learning Strategy with Business Goals, a hands-on 90-minute mastery session—and dozens of other sessions and activities addressing data in L&D, strategic alignment, and much more! The Learning Leadership Conference is October 1-3, 2025, in Orlando Florida. Register today!

Image credit: Anagramm

The post The Alignment Advantage: How Learning Teams Can Drive Strategic Value appeared first on Learning Guild.