Talent Development's

Skills Playbook

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Career-driven learning is key

As companies navigate technological transformation, talent leaders must energize top talent, optimize programs, and inspire skill-building to stay future-ready.

The key is career-driven learning—combining upskilling, coaching, and internal mobility to align employees' career goals with organizational needs. For companies to thrive, employees must be empowered to excel.

Progress toward career goals is employees’ #1 motivation to learn

Source:
2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report

Put the right people, with the right skills, in the right jobs.

The rise of AI requires businesses to be more agile in skill development, but Learning and Talent Development leaders often find it challenging to adapt at speed and scale. Meeting this moment requires a new playbook for adaptable upskilling strategies, because things are changing too quickly to do things the way you’ve always done them.

This playbook will show you how to create agility in three critical aspects of skill-development: Your process for rolling out programs, your approach to engaging managers, and your approach to helping your employees navigate their careers.

Even if you aren’t changing your job, your job is most likely changing on you.”

Ryan Roslansky
Chief Executive Officer at LinkedIn

Bolster career-driven learning with three types of agility:

Process Agility

Create faster cycles of iteration in upskilling initiatives.

Manager Agility

Managers should be your strongest advocates for continuous upskilling.

Agile Employee Career Development

Empower employees to learn skills to advance their careers.

Two people in a discussion sitting on the couch

Process Agility
Manager Agility
Employee Agility

Process Agility

Audit skills frequently

Roll out new programs quickly

The skills to stay competitive are changing all the time. Keeping pace requires more speed and dynamism in your skill-building programs.

In this section, we’ll explore two ways Learning and Talent Development pros are making their upskilling processes more agile.

Audit skills frequently

Leverage two key data sources to determine the most business-critical skills:

Internal stakeholders’ learning priorities

Identify business leaders’ their strategic goals — and the skills required to achieve them.

Benton McTaggart, Founder of Benton McTaggart Coaching, recommends shadowing teams to identify pain points that learning can address, and regularly asking:

Roll out new programs quickly

Like product cycles, time to launch of learning programs matters. For example, Michelle Randall-Berry, Global Head of Talent at Teradyne, spearheaded an effort that went from concept to launch of a core upskilling curriculum — that would usually take 12 months — in 45 days. Her team reached this velocity by:

Securing executive leadership support early on

Early leadership buy-in helps cement your project's significance and fuels a company-wide push for upskilling

Proactively communicating goals and progress to stakeholders

Instead of waiting for major milestones, share work-in-progress updates to allow for faster course corrections

Creating feedback loops with impacted teams

As early as possible, gather cross-functional leaders to provide feedback on content relevance and to help validate learning approaches

Not sure where to get started?

Try shifting annual skill assessment conversations to monthly check-ins with leaders, or provide biweekly written updates to a few select leaders.

LinkedIn data shows that skills have changed 25% since 2015

By 2030, that number is expected to reach at least 70%

Source: 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report

Exercise: Put the right foundations in place for process agility

Use this worksheet to identify areas for acceleration.

Access the worksheet

Illustration of 2 people sitting down and talking

Manager Agility

Translate business priorities into manager priorities

Equip managers to deliver on your skill priorities

Managers are where your people’s skills and career development meet business needs — and should be your strongest advocates for upskilling.

Translate business priorities into manager priorities

For example, talent development can connect managers’ priorities with an organization-wide goal, like AI upskilling.

Priority

Desired outcome

Business-level

Improved AI proficiency across the business.

Department-level

Product department leverages AI to shorten product cycles.

Manager-level

Product team leads leverage AI to conduct quality control, build user personas, analyze data, improve SEO, etc.

Don’t assume that different functions have the same learning needs across the board — tailor upskilling to each function. What does Engineering need? What does Sales need? Find out and give it to them.”

Chrissy Roth-Francis
Director of Talent Development at LinkedIn

Equip managers to deliver on your skill priorities

Managers need the right tools and training resources to help their teams build business-critical skills.

If you’re sitting in a talent planning room, you’re looking at great talent and asking, ‘What’s next for them? How can they develop and how can we, as an organization, make that happen?’ That’s the unlock — the decoder ring we’re all looking for.”

Rebecca Romano
SVP, Head of Global Talent Development at NBCUniversal

These four qualities have helped make LinkedIn’s manager trainings effective:

Community-based

Cohorts and discussion forums allow managers to ideate and problem-solve on how to best upskill their teams

Scalable

AI coaching and feedback bots for managers to prepare difficult conversations

Personalized

Have a common training curriculum — but suggest ways for managers to customize them to their teams and departments

Iterative

Create venues for managers to give the Talent Development pros regular feedback on upskilling resources

50% of managers lack proper support for upskilling

Source: 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report

LinkedIn’s Manager Training Programs

LinkedIn offers manager upskilling programs in various formats and durations to meet managers’ needs. These include live workshops, one-on-one discussions, small group activities, and assignments embedded into managers' work, such as prompts for employee check-ins and performance reviews.

As Chrissy Roth-Francis, Director of Talent Development at LinkedIn, says, “The activities are actionable, not just theoretical, and are integrated into the flow of work.” Programs vary from in-depth, cohort-based courses to shorter, lighter ones, and are regularly refined to align with organizational needs and skill development.

People managers at many companies are overwhelmed — juggling team leadership, employee well-being, and their full-time roles. At The Coca-Cola Company, we've focused on setting our people managers up for success by enabling them to better coach, remove roadblocks, and align priorities around the work that matters most. Over the past three years, we've seen significant improvements in how our managers are rated by our people, along with overall satisfaction working at Coca-Cola.”

Tapaswee Chandele
Senior Vice President of Global Talent, Development & System Partnerships at The Coca-Cola Company

Exercise: Are your managers upskilling champions?

Use this worksheet to cascade business priorities to team-level skill-building goals across key departments.

Access the worksheet

Employee Agility

Skills-focused mentoring

Employee reskilling

Peer-based learning

Learning agility fuels both employee career growth — and productivity that helps your business.

According to our latest Workplace Learning Report, the most common career development practices employed by organizations globally are:

Most common career development practices:

Leadership training

71%

Sharing internal job openings

59%

Creating individual career development plans or maps

55%

Mentorship programs

55%

Recognition and reward programs (excluding promotions)

50%

Opportunities to participate in cross-functional projects

45%

Internal mobility programs

44%

Tuition reimbursement / continuing education support

41%

Peer learning groups

31%

Job rotation initiatives

26%

Two people sitting on a couch having a conversation

Source: 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report

This section will focus on three common career development practices that are highly effective but often overlooked:

Mentorship programs
Opportunities to participate in cross-functional projects
Peer learning groups

Skill-specific mentoring programs

55% of L&D professionals surveyed in the 2025 LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report have set up mentoring programs. But there is still untapped potential: use those mentoring programs to build business-critical skills.   

Mark Pearson, Corporate Vice President of Talent, Culture and Community at AMD, has seen how mentoring has helped Gen Zers in particular build both technical skills and relationships across their organization.

Mentoring programs are especially helpful for deeply technical AI upskilling. With technology and skill sets so radically new, people haven't had time document best practices. Mentoring circles are having a huge impact. We ask technical mentees what skill they most need help on, and then we connect them with a senior manager who specializes in that skill.”

Mark Pearson
Corporate Vice President of Talent, Culture and Community at AMD

Build a more agile mentoring program by:

Making mentor cycles shorter (no longer than 3 months)

Engaging a variety of mentors across the organization

Helping employees tap mentors with diverse expertise, from technical upskilling to leadership coaching

Helping new college graduates meet, learn from, and build working relationships with seasoned professionals across the organization

Employee Reskilling

Reskilling your existing employees to fill internal roles is a great way to move skills and people throughout your organization. This approach minimizes the costs of making external hires and provides employees a way to use new skills to propel their careers.

For example, Amazon’s Career Choice program supports frontline employees' skill development by encouraging managers to regularly discuss career growth and advancement with them.

Introducing the value of upskilling widely and early

Amazon introduces the Career Choice program to managers in their initial training, priming them on the importance of upskilling early on

Reminders in the flow of work

Associates receive timely reminders to sign up for the program via warehouse scanners they interact with regularly

By arming our managers with these tools and fostering a culture of continuous learning, we ensure that new technologies create more opportunities for our workforce, reinforcing our commitment to striving to be Earth's best employer.”

Tammy Thieman
Director, Career Choice at Amazon

Consider:

While Amazon’s $1.2B investment in Career Choice might seem like a large lift, you can start small. Can you engage employees in upskilling conversations as a routine part of their performance management? Are their moments in the flow of work you can leverage to remind employees to practice new skills?

Peer-based, skill-driven learning

Peer learning helps employees both make time for learning and retain knowledge.

Thomson Reuters is a great example of peer learning: they held a global AI learning day, featuring both group lessons and dedicated time for employees to experiment with AI and collaborate with one another.

In addition to structured learning and time for experimentation, Thomson Reuters gives employees access to their internal Gen AI playground and offers guided suggestions for how to use it.

This program helped Thomson Reuters build lasting hands-on learning driven by experimentation and employee ownership of the learning process.