Not just for kids: why going back to school is good for business and employees

Even those of us without school-age children have felt this month’s collective exhale as the little darlings trot off, new shoes briefly gleaming, back into the warm embrace of our educational establishments. But learning should be on our minds in the workplace, not just on the school run. Demographic shifts and changing skill requirements lead the elements driving a development gap that businesses need to continue to bridge. Fast.

The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report has predicted a roller coaster of skills-disruption statistics since it began in 2016. Although the latest figures (published 2025) are more reassuring than previous alarm bells, they still predict that 39% of workers’ core skills will change by 2030.

It’s a broad brushstroke though: drill down into different global economies and industries and the picture becomes more varied. While this isn’t the time or place to look into them all, it’s fair to say that new core skills are emerging all the time, across the board. And while the detail may change, the principle of continuous learning as a business benefit is universal.

Organisational benefit

On paper, everyone knows that organisations failing to develop their workforce risk falling behind in both productivity and performance. Yet despite this knowledge, LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report suggests that it’s still an issue that’s keeping us awake at night. Of the L&D professionals surveyed, 49% agreed ‘my executives are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to execute our business strategy’.

The magic ingredient might not actually be ticking off the learning modules. The data found that organisations with mature career development programmes outpace rivals in various indicators of business success, including talent attraction and retention.

What’s in it for me?

Those findings make perfect sense when you harness it to the same report’s finding that career progression is employees’ number one motivation for learning. In other words: sure, learning brings immediate benefits such as confidence, engagement, adaptability and capability but unless you hook it to career development, those employees will simply trot off to their next role, taking what they learned with them.

The learning culture

The best way of avoiding this trap is to embed learning into the everyday, providing opportunities for knowledge-sharing across teams and locations, and creating coaching and mentoring programmes, whether formal or informal. And that needs to come from the top. Unless leaders have responsibility for development, they’ll naturally prioritise other KPIs – as well as blocking internal mobility to save themselves the headache of replacement. Most of us continue to face commercial priorities that increasingly demand more for less, so small wonder our leaders often fall into the temptation of focusing solely on the bottom line. Particularly if that’s what’s being scrutinised in the boardroom. But this is a cultural shift that goes far beyond ring-fencing decent L&D budgets. CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) research consistently points to leadership support as a key factor in creating successful learning cultures.

A virtuous circle then.

And it doesn’t stop at director level. The institute advises L&D professionals to speed up that cultural shift by empowering and encouraging line managers to bake learning into everyday work life.

Creating a culture of learning at this more granular level is a manageable and practical way of capturing and sharing ideas and making sure individuals aren’t overlooked in their development.

Climate of trust

While people will struggle to achieve their career goals without understanding the skills they’ll need to get there, it’s also true that spending their time bagging a huge collection of random learning modules with no focus is a waste of their time – not to mention the business’s money.

And the glue that binds them both is trust. Which is why the smart L&D professional should be focusing on connecting with teams and drawing up clear career pathways.

Our time at school comes to an end eventually, which is reassuring if you’re a particularly beleaguered parent, currently counting the summer’s tally of grey hairs and overdraft fees. But workplace learning is evergreen. And we can all champion it.

Let’s close with five ways you can turn up the dial on a continuous learning culture:

1. Make learning visible - ditch the ‘build it and they will come’ theory on this one. You’ve invested heavily in learning resources – but do your employees know what’s on offer and why it matters? Keep talking about learning opportunities, share stories of colleagues who are poster people for learning for career development and link initiatives to business priorities.
2. Make development matter for managers - equip them with the tools and resources to have meaningful conversations about development goals in their one-to-ones – plus the coaching skills to guide and encourage. And make sure long-term L&D is on the agenda in important conversations, and doesn’t get crowded out by the newsflash excitement of quarterly reports and half-yearly projections.
3. Celebrate learning - as with the previous point, rewarding performance and ignoring skills development gives colleagues little incentive to head to the classroom. Recognise innovation and experimentation for their own sake, sharing stories where learning powered fresh thinking. What we celebrate is what we encourage.
4. Embed learning into the everyday - on the job learning is more powerful than any theoretical teaching. Promote mentoring, enable cross-functional projects and create forums where people can share their knowledge without gatekeeping or ego.
5. Sell the future - a course is one thing. Painting the picture of the future it could enable is infinitely more enticing. Map out potential career pathways, highlighting internal opportunities and spelling out the skills likely to be most valuable in the years ahead.

Learning cultures aren’t built by the size of the budget or the breadth of a resource library. They’re created when leaders, HR teams and communicators consistently make space to promote and reward growth, curiosity and development. And that’s when organisations don’t just keep pace with change. They shape it.