How can learning leaders navigate market shifts, lead through change and build a future-ready workforce?  

In this bonus content for The Business of Learning, recorded live in person, we sat down with Ken Taylor, CEO of Training Industry, to unpack the current state of the corporate training market and what L&D professionals should be focused on right now.  

Tune in to learn: 

• The two main “camps” of L&D teams navigating AI adoption.
• Why staying grounded in the what — not the how — matters most in the age of AI. 
• The timeless (yet increasingly important) value of communication and critical thinking skills.

More Resources:

• [Report]: The State of the Corporate Training Market
• [Industry Coverage] M&A Incorporate Training
• [Job Aid] AI Use Cases for L&D

The transcript for this episode follows:  

Speaker: Welcome to the Business of Learning, the learning leader’s podcast from Training Industry, where we speak with industry experts and thought leaders on all things learning and development. 

Sarah Gallo: Welcome back to the Business of Learning. I’m Sarah Gallo here with my co-host, Michelle Eggleston Schwartz, recording in person today, and we’re joined by Ken Taylor, Training Industry’s CEO. So welcome, Ken. 

Ken Taylor: Thanks. Looking forward to it. 

Sarah Gallo: And today, we’re excited to discuss where the corporate L&D market stands today, how L&D leaders can guide their organizations through change and into the future and also really what it takes to build that future-ready workforce. So with that, let’s go ahead and dive in. 

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Yes, thank you for joining us today, Ken, very happy to have you here. So as we all know, there’s a lot of noise right now around market changes and shifts, specifically around AI. How would you describe the current state of the L&D market? 

Ken Taylor: It’s really just, am I doing good development for the employees? So AI as a tool, I almost think of it like Excel, like we’re all going to learn how to use Excel. And if you didn’t have Excel before you used the calculator, but you still could do math, it took a lot longer to think, but you could see the AI is going to help us just be better at developing courses and better at creating experiences and then better as employees in whatever workflow we’re in. So I think, I think it’s a bit of calm, a bit of remembering what’s super important in terms of L&D programs and then leveraging the tools around you to make it happen. 

Sarah Gallo: It’s almost like those fundamental skills like communication and skills like that are really important when it comes to these times of change. 

Ken Taylor: Sure, great point. We just recently did some research around leadership development, specifically what skills are most coveted by leaders today given this change environment? And communication skills were number one. They’ve always been number one, nothing’s changed. It’s still about talking and still about being able to communicate a vision to a team. So if you’re in a leadership position, that’s the thing you’ve got to master first, because if you can’t create sort of compelling energy around moving in a direction to support goals, it’s going to be pretty tricky to get a team to do anything. 

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Right. Kind of talking a little bit more about skills because there’s so much focus right now around skills development. I’d love to hear kind of what other skills learning leaders should be focused on for their workforce to make sure that they’re ready for not just current challenges, but future challenges as well. 

Ken Taylor: I really think there’s something about critical thinking that’s becoming super important for employees kind of in all jobs. I mean, you have to get the technical skills required to be able to do the role you’re doing. So if you’re going to be a marketeer, you’ve got to learn marketing. You’ve got to just know how marketing works, right? But you also are going to have so much given to you that’s going to be at such a different state of readiness because the tools are going to prepare things for you. They’re going to write slogans, they’re going to give you campaigns, they’re going to give you imagery. You have to be able to look at those things with sort of a critical lens, leveraging what you know about marketing, but then using it in a way to kind of move the project along and not get bogged down in the details that you used to have to get bogged down in. 

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: : Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much for sitting down with us today and talking to us, Ken, about the state of corporate training. 

Ken Taylor: Yeah. 

Michelle Eggleston Schwartz: Do you have any final tips?  

Ken Taylor: No, This was a blast. I’m glad we did it at TICE and maybe we’ll do it again next year. See you later. 

Speaker: For more resources on this topic, check out the episode description or visit the show notes on our website at trainingindustry.com/podcast. And don’t forget to read and review us wherever you tune in to The Business of Learning. Until next time.