Design in Motion: What This Week’s Corporate Learning Headlines Reveal About the Future of LXD
- marleegeiger
- May 12, 2025
- 5 min read
From AI-driven coaching to inclusive leadership, this week's biggest Learning Experience Design trends offer a glimpse into what tomorrow’s workforce really needs.
“We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” — Hemingway
It can be hard to feel as if you are designing for people or at people sometimes in the modern LxD world. We feel the tension through the massive cultural change worldwide of organizations changing from traditional 5 days in the office to hybrid or even fully remote environments. We also feel it in the data, which only tells when a user completes a course. It can be hard to feel the personal connection when you may never see the learner face to face.
This week, I felt that tension in some of the headlines I’ve looked at. But through these headlines, I felt LxD is shifting from pure function to philosophy and meaning. It’s not only metrics, and it hasn’t been for a long time.
Below are five articles from the past week that reveal where we are heading as LxD professionals and what that asks of us as creators.
There are times when it feels like I’m living in a Black Mirror episode, and I’m not sure if it’s San Junipero or any other episode that leaves me feeling uneasy.
Companies like WPP have begun rolling out AI-driven coaching tools that offer scalable leadership support. While these robots may not be Rosey from The Jetsons, they aren’t just talking calendars. They tackle difficult topics such as team communication, career transitions, and conflict resolution with the patience only something that isn’t on a human’s schedule can do.
Sure, this may spark some dystopian unease, but it also opens doors for LxD professionals.
What this means for us:
Sometimes, AI being implanted into virtually every piece of software we use may seem like a gimmick, but I’d like you to envision this as an invitation. Through these AI coaches, we can gain real-time, learner-initiated, feedback-rich interaction that most corporate training can’t or won’t touch. They’re coaching in moments of learner need, not when a learner decides to open a course to check a box.
For us? Maybe we start to look at this and how we can make our designs more conversational and responsible. Less about lessons and more about relationships. Even if that relationship starts with a robot.
SweetRush recently introduced a new acronym for us to remember. Live Experiential Learning (LEL) blends the emotional energy of live facilitation with the interactivity of immersive simulations. While this feels like a TEDx Talk waiting to happen, the concept may just be transformative for LxD professionals. The result is less lecturing and more lived experiences.
Imagine a breakout room that could replicate real-life crises. Coaching simulations driven by an AI avatar. Or soft-skilled tested in the heat of a controlled failure.
What this means for us:
Although hybrid and remote learning have been the norm for about five years now (COVID started that long ago?), it can still be hard to replicate the energy that you get from a live classroom in a digital course. But should we try to replicate something that probably needed to be updated anyway? LEL dares us to move beyond what we’ve done and towards memory-making. Towards learning that feels real enough to stick.
If we choose to embrace this model, we may need to become part dungeon master in the process, but that may just make it more exciting for us as well.
LinkedIn Learning may be the most diverse place where learners meet. Learners from all types of organizations and all job functions of jobs come to learn new skills. So when they drop their 2025 Workplace Learning Report and explain that if you don’t invest in your people, be prepared to lose them, you listen.
The report is dense with insights. But through all these insights, the theme is clear that prioritizing internal mobility with upskilling, reskilling, and cross-functional growth is significantly more likely to retain their best people.
One of the most referenced tools in the report is MyGrowth, an internal learning hub that blends personalized development plans with career coaching and community support.
What this means for us:
The era of mandatory compliance training as the sole training is over. People don’t stay for the annual cybersecurity phishing training. LxD needs to start becoming less about curriculum delivery and more about career curation.
We need to be asking, “Where can this training lead someone? A dead end? Or a Door?”
Onboarding has been stuck for decades. Even at its best, onboarding can feel like checking the boxes and signing the digital handbooks. But Training Magazine challenges this legacy model and urges us as LxD professionals to reconsider onboarding as an experience, not just to funnel information.
Drawing from the insights of the best of the best that LxD has, the article outlines how high-performing organizations are redesigning onboarding to focus on culture, confidence, and belonging. These LxD teams aren’t just showing new hires what Slack channels to post in. They’re welcoming them into the narrative of the company.
What this means for us:
When a new hire starts their first day, onboarding is the first story they will partake in. For modern organizations, retention is directly linked to belonging, so the first story needs to be clear, warm, and rooted in meaning.
We need to reimagine the onboarding process not as a training module, but as a narrative arc. What do we want the learner to feel after their first day? After their first week?
Onboarding is an experience, and it deserves our best design because it may just be the most important design we make.
The Guardian profiles corporate learning programs centered on inclusive leadership, unconscious bias, and AI ethics in this article. These aren’t the normal checkbox modules. They’re nuances and are often co-designed with underrepresented employees.
One of the standout examples from the article was from a Fortune 500 firm that built a “bias-in-design” bootcamp for their Product Managers.
What this means for us:In a world where DEI seems to be a decisive term (weirdly), we as LxD professionals can no longer treat inclusion as a topic course. It needs to be embedded into our design touchpoints. It’s in all the scenarios we design and in the data we use to validate success.
Inclusive learning design isn’t just about diversifying content, it’s about diversifying power. This begins with us and who we invite into our design process.
The future of LxD isn’t waiting, it’s unfolding right in front of us. If this week’s news sparked something in you, don’t let it fade.
And if this resonated with you, share it. With your team. With your manager. With the person in your Slack DMs asking, “Do we really need another compliance course?”
Because no, we don’t.
We need better ones—and that starts with you.
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