Quick answer: What is learning and development?
Learning and development, often shortened to L&D, is the business function that helps employees build the skills, knowledge, behaviors, and confidence they need to do their jobs well and grow into future roles. In 2026, L&D is no longer just about courses, compliance, or one-off training sessions. It supports workforce upskilling, AI fluency, leadership development, internal mobility, performance improvement, and long-term business resilience. A strong L&D strategy connects learning to business goals, identifies skill gaps, gives employees practical ways to learn, and measures whether learning changes behavior and improves results.
What does learning and development include?
Learning and development includes every structured effort a company uses to help employees learn, practice, and grow. That can include onboarding, compliance training, manager training, sales enablement, product education, technical upskilling, leadership development, mentoring, coaching, peer learning, video training, e-learning, and on-the-job practice.
The best L&D programs don’t treat learning as a separate activity employees squeeze in after their “real work” is done. Instead, they build learning into the way work happens. That might mean a new hire watches a short video before trying a task, a customer support rep reviews a screen-recorded workflow before answering a ticket, or a manager uses a coaching guide before a difficult conversation.
Good L&D also supports both the employee and the organization. Employees get clearer growth paths, better skills, and more confidence. Organizations get stronger performance, better retention, faster onboarding, and a workforce that can adapt when tools, markets, and customer expectations change.
Learning and development vs. training and development
Training and development focuses on helping employees learn specific skills for a current role or task. Learning and development is broader. It includes training, but it also covers career growth, leadership development, coaching, mentoring, internal mobility, knowledge sharing, and long-term workforce capability.
For example, a company might train a new sales rep on product messaging, CRM workflows, and objection handling. That’s training. But if the company also builds a career path, offers coaching, teaches leadership skills, and helps that rep move into a senior role over time, that’s learning and development.
Why learning and development matters in 2026
L&D matters because skill gaps now create direct business risk. Companies need employees who can use AI responsibly, adapt to new workflows, serve customers well, communicate clearly, lead through change, and learn faster than the business environment shifts.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 found that employers expect 39% of workers’ core skills to change by 2030. That’s a huge signal for L&D teams. The work isn’t just to teach today’s tools. It’s to help people build the habit of continuous learning.
L&D also plays a major role in employee retention. Employees want to know they have a future inside the company. When career development feels vague, people often look elsewhere for growth. When learning feels practical, supported, and connected to real opportunities, employees have more reasons to stay.
Finally, L&D helps companies preserve knowledge. Every business has critical processes locked in someone’s head, buried in Slack threads, or scattered across old documents. Modern L&D turns that knowledge into reusable, searchable, easy-to-update resources.
What changed in L&D in 2026?
The biggest change is that L&D has become more strategic. Teams still create courses, but they also help organizations plan for future skills, adopt AI, reduce knowledge loss, and measure learning impact.
A few changes matter most:
| 2026 shift | What it means for L&D |
|---|---|
| AI is changing how work gets done | Employees need practical AI fluency, not vague AI awareness. |
| Skill needs are changing faster | L&D must identify, prioritize, and close skill gaps continuously. |
| Learning budgets face scrutiny | Teams need to show business impact, not just completions. |
| Employees need time to learn | Learning has to fit into workflows, not compete with them. |
| Career development drives retention | L&D should connect learning to internal mobility and growth. |
| Video and AI tools speed up content creation | Teams can turn expertise into training assets faster than before. |
In other words, L&D teams need to act less like course libraries and more like capability builders.
Examples of learning and development programs
Here are common L&D programs and what they help companies accomplish:
| L&D program | Business goal | Example |
|---|---|---|
| New hire onboarding | Reduce time to productivity | A role-specific video path for a new employee’s first 30 days |
| AI fluency training | Improve safe and useful AI adoption | Prompting, fact-checking, privacy, and workflow training |
| Manager training | Improve team performance | Coaching, feedback, delegation, and conflict resolution practice |
| Sales enablement | Improve revenue performance | Product demo videos, objection handling, and customer story reviews |
| Compliance training | Reduce risk | Policy refreshers, scenario-based videos, and short assessments |
| Technical upskilling | Close skill gaps | Training for software, data tools, cybersecurity, or automation |
| Customer support training | Improve customer experience | Screen-recorded troubleshooting guides and workflow SOPs |
| Leadership development | Build future leaders | Mentoring, cohort learning, and real business projects |
The strongest programs combine explanation, demonstration, practice, feedback, and reinforcement. Employees usually don’t change behavior because they watched one long training module. They change behavior when learning feels useful, specific, repeated, and connected to the work they already do.
How to create a learning and development strategy
A learning and development strategy is a plan for building the skills your organization needs now and in the future. Here’s a practical way to build one.
1. Start with business priorities
Identify the goals that matter most this year. These might include faster onboarding, better manager performance, higher sales productivity, improved customer support, safer AI adoption, or fewer compliance mistakes.
2. Map current and future skills
Look at the skills employees have today and the skills they’ll need next. Use manager input, employee surveys, performance data, role expectations, and workforce planning.
3. Prioritize the biggest gaps
Don’t try to train everyone on everything. Focus on the gaps that create the most risk or unlock the most business value.
4. Choose the right learning format
Use the format that fits the task. A policy update might need a short explainer video. A leadership skill might need coaching and practice. A software workflow might need a screen recording or step-by-step SOP.
5. Build learning into work
Make learning easy to access at the moment someone needs it. Use short videos, checklists, templates, searchable knowledge bases, manager prompts, and refreshers.
6. Create reusable learning assets
Turn repeatable tasks into training resources. Record workflows, document best practices, and update assets when processes change.
7. Measure outcomes
Track whether employees complete training, but don’t stop there. Measure behavior change, time to proficiency, productivity, error reduction, internal mobility, retention, customer satisfaction, or revenue impact.
8. Improve continuously
Review learning programs regularly. Retire outdated content, update old examples, ask learners what helped, and keep the strategy aligned with business goals.
How to measure L&D success and ROI
L&D success should include both learning metrics and business metrics. Completion rates can tell you whether people finished a program, but they don’t prove the program worked.
Useful L&D metrics include:
| Metric | What it tells you |
|---|---|
| Completion rate | Whether employees finished the training |
| Assessment score | Whether employees understood the material |
| Time to productivity | How quickly employees became effective |
| Skill growth | Whether employees gained target capabilities |
| Behavior change | Whether employees applied the learning on the job |
| Error reduction | Whether training reduced mistakes or rework |
| Internal mobility | Whether employees moved into new roles |
| Retention | Whether learning supported employee growth and loyalty |
| Business KPI movement | Whether training improved revenue, support quality, productivity, safety, or compliance |
To calculate L&D ROI, compare the cost of a learning program with the value it creates. For example, if a product training program helps new sales reps ramp faster, the value might come from earlier pipeline creation or higher close rates. If a support training program reduces repeat tickets, the value might come from saved agent time and better customer satisfaction.
The key is to define the business outcome before building the program. If you wait until after launch to decide what success means, you’ll probably end up measuring whatever is easiest instead of what matters.
How video supports learning and development
Video has become one of the most useful formats for L&D because it can show, explain, and preserve knowledge at the same time. It works especially well for onboarding, software training, process documentation, product education, leadership messages, and repeatable internal updates.
Video also helps teams scale subject matter expertise. Instead of asking the same expert to explain the same workflow over and over, an L&D team can record the process once, edit it into a clear training asset, and update the relevant scenes when the process changes.
For distributed, hybrid, or global teams, video creates consistency. Everyone can see the same demonstration, hear the same explanation, and revisit the material when they need it.
How Visla helps L&D teams create training videos
Visla helps L&D teams move from idea to finished training video faster. You can record your screen, capture a process, turn existing materials into video, edit at the scene level, collaborate with teammates, and share finished videos from one platform.
For process training, screen recording and Step Recorder can turn a workflow into a clear how-to video. For onboarding and internal education, AI Video Agent can transform an idea, script, webpage, PDF, presentation, or existing media into a structured video draft. For more polished training content, AI Director Mode can help plan videos scene by scene before generating AI video clips, which makes it easier to keep characters, environments, products, logos, and brand assets consistent.
Visla also supports collaboration. L&D teams can work with HR, managers, product teams, compliance leaders, and subject matter experts in shared workspaces, then collect comments and approvals without losing track of versions.
The result is a more scalable L&D workflow. Teams can create training content faster, keep it consistent, and update it when policies, products, or processes change.
FAQ
L&D means learning and development. It’s how a company helps employees build the skills and knowledge they need to perform well, grow in their careers, and adapt to change.
The main goal of L&D is to improve employee capability in ways that support business goals. That can include faster onboarding, better performance, stronger leadership, higher retention, safer compliance, or improved customer outcomes.
HR manages the broader employee experience, including hiring, benefits, policies, performance, and employee relations. L&D is usually part of HR or closely connected to it, but it focuses specifically on employee learning, skill development, and career growth.
Important L&D topics in 2026 include AI fluency, leadership development, manager training, internal mobility, compliance, technical upskilling, customer experience, communication, and change management. The best topics depend on the skills your organization needs most.
Companies can make L&D more effective by connecting learning to business goals, making training practical, giving employees time to learn, using managers as coaches, and measuring behavior change. Short, useful, easy-to-update resources often work better than long courses employees rarely revisit.
May Horiuchi
May is a Content Specialist and AI Expert for Visla. She is an in-house expert on anything Visla and loves testing out different AI tools to figure out which ones are actually helpful and useful for content creators, businesses, and organizations.