Mastering The New L&D Skillset in the Age Of AI

Wil Procter – Strategy and Innovation Director at Nazaré, follow me on LinkedIn

I’m so grateful to Instinct for inviting me to speak at 2025 Learning Technologies. After last years’ packed session on building your AI toolkit we had a lot to live up to so we jumped on a call to start thinking about what would be most useful for an audience of L&D professionals with an interest in technology.

We decided to explore the skills L&D folks will need to feel confident in a world of work being constantly reshaped by AI. So we settled on the title ‘Mastering the new L&D skillset in the age of AI’

Instinct reviews hundreds of L&D job adverts each year. They’re rich with signals, but historically, they’ve been difficult to decode—the language varies, titles can be misleading and until recently, extracting meaningful insight from them was more art than science.

But now, using AI, it’s possible to clean, analyse and make sense of messy, unstructured job ads at scale. That allowed us to see patterns—what skills are in demand across different roles, sectors, and specialisms. A clearer picture of present-day expectations began to emerge.

But that only tells us about now. The bigger question is: where are we headed?

To explore that, we turned to scenario planning—a method famously used by Shell, McKinsey, and others to help navigate uncertainty. The aim wasn’t to predict the future, but to build out plausible ones and examine their implications.

We developed four scenarios, each grounded in observable signals. Then we overlaid them with data: which skills each scenario would demand, which of those already appear in job ads, and what more than 150 learning professionals told us they want to focus on in their own development this year.

The result is a framework that combines evidence and foresight—a way to reflect on where L&D is heading, and how to stay ahead.

Because in the age of AI, the question isn’t just what skills are trending. It’s which future you’re preparing for.

Four Futures for Learning and Development

1. Performance Accelerator
   Learning as a business ROI machine

• Signals: Growth in performance analytics, increased pressure on enablement teams, rise of sales operations.
• What success looks like: Productivity gains, faster onboarding, reduced error rates.
• Skills to develop: Performance consulting, technology fluency, agile product management, data analytics.

2. Employee Experience Hub
   Learning as a driver of engagement, culture, and wellbeing

• Signals: Declining employee engagement, increasing burnout, growing evidence linking EX and business performance.
• What success looks like: Strong engagement scores, high retention, internal mobility.
• Skills to develop: Community facilitation, emotional intelligence, UX, social learning design.

3. Reskilling Catalyst
   Learning as a workforce adaptability engine

• Signals: AI-driven job transformation, government incentives for reskilling, sector-specific talent shortages.
• What success looks like: Speed and effectiveness of redeployment, closing critical skills gaps.
• Skills to develop: Workforce planning, change communication, behavioural science, assessment design.

4. Autonomous Learning Ecosystem
   Learning as an AI-powered, self-service system

• Signals: Increasing autonomy in knowledge work, learning in the flow of work, maturing AI capabilities.
• What success looks like: On-demand learning directly connected to job performance.
• Skills to develop: Data literacy, ethical reasoning, AI fluency, content curation.

From platform to product mindset

In several of these futures, the traditional L&D playbook no longer fits. Take the Performance Accelerator scenario. The goal isn’t to deliver content—it’s to embed capability where it’s needed most. That might mean nudges inside Salesforce, guidance baked into comms tools, or contextual help built into day-to-day workflows.

To succeed in this environment, L&D professionals will need to adopt a product mindset:

• Manage portfolios of tools and interventions, not just programmes.
• Build continuous feedback loops.
• Think of learners as users.

This shift is already under way. Some organisations are embedding L&D into cross-functional teams. Others are managing internal systems with the same discipline they apply to customer-facing tech.

The grand reveal

Those of you who’ve attended on of my talks before will know I (and the audience) love a matrix, and this years’ was a cracker. A rollup of the key skills needed to succeed in each future, along with prioritisation and counts of mentions in our sample of job adverts.

What the room told us

During my session at Learning Technologies 2025, some of the most powerful feedback was unspoken—nodding heads. The futures weren’t theoretical. They were already emerging. Many in the audience had seen vendors promising autonomous learning platforms or performance-linked plug-ins.

We had hoped to capture more live data from the audience, but the Wi-Fi had other plans. Still, the reaction was clear: people recognised the scenarios, and wanted to understand how to position themselves within them.

The one skill to build

If you’re going to prioritise one area of development this year, make it data literacy. Not just technical dashboards, but a deeper fluency:

• Understanding how evidence works—and where it breaks down.
• Identifying flawed assumptions.
• Telling compelling stories with numbers.

No matter which future unfolds, the ability to interpret and communicate data is foundational. It’s how you earn trust, shape strategy, and stay relevant.

Choose your future

These scenarios aren’t exclusive. Organisations will likely blend elements of each. But as individuals, we can’t be everywhere at once. We need to choose where to focus.

So: which future are you preparing for? Which skills will you invest in? And how will you shape your own path forward?

Because change is already happening. The question is whether you’re ready to meet it.