During a skills crisis, LinkedIn’s report goes all-in for career development.
Here’s why, and what to do next.
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report has arrived, and the takeaway is clear: career development is here to stay. While career-building has long been a familiar strategy for employee engagement, the report reveals it’s been overlooked in recent years. But the urgency is real—39% of all employees will need reskilling by 2030. With renewed interest in skills-building and the right technology to support it, now is the time to create engaging learning experiences that will motivate employees and align with your organization’s goals.
In this latest report, the data is based on global, L&D-centered research from 937 experts and leverages LinkedIn platform insights from their 1 billion members. The results show a stark divide in the success of those LinkedIn defines as career development champions and non-champions.
Highlights include:
- Why career development is still the number one learning strategy
- How learning strategists engage employees in career-thinking
- What strategies are needed for the 88% of organizations concerned about retention
So what does this mean for you? That leaning into career-thinking enables your workforce to adapt to new technology faster, retain and attract top talent at higher rates, improve employee satisfaction, and much more.
The familiar, new, and actionable is all for you to discover in our 2025 Workplace Learning Report guide.
Traditional career-building tactics remain essential
What defines career development in 2025? Maybe you’ll find it comforting that not much has changed at all. The report found leadership training, internal mobility, and mentoring are still some of the most common strategies for meeting business goals with career development.
LinkedIn’s top 5 most common career development strategies for 2025 are:
- Leadership training (71%)
- Sharing internal job openings (59%)
- Mentorship programs (55%)
- Career development plans (55%)
- Cross-functional projects (45%)
These common strategies show that championing career development is deeply connected to building strong workplace relationships and collaboration. So, what has changed? It’s how we facilitate and track the success of career-building connections with technology. With a strategic learning system for leadership training, job announcements, and mentorship, employees can build relationships around learning without hopping between disparate platforms. This removes the huge barrier to communicating the value of career development at every level of an organization.
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Strategic career development programs outpace others
To demonstrate the value of a career-focused strategy, the 2025 LinkedIn Report breaks down respondents into two categories: career development champions and non-champions. Champions only amount to 36% of respondents but have successfully deployed strategic career programs that deliver on key employee success metrics. Non-champions represent organizations that are falling behind in meeting their employee’s needs.
So how does the data stack up? Based on the respondents’ key priorities, strategic learning is driving notably higher ROI.
Career development champions are:
- 11% more confident in their organization’s ability to attract qualified talent.
- 13% more confident in their organization’s ability to retain qualified talent.
- 15% more likely to view their organization as accelerating or leading in generative AI (GAI) adoption.
Employees know that great careers are built on keeping up with even minor changes in the technology they use to get their jobs done. Global HR industry analyst Josh Bersin stresses that the hunger for upskilling is, in fact, an ultimatum. Employees want you to either keep their skills competitive, or they’ll likely leave.
Where you stand: Does your organization need to champion career development?
Are you aligning your employees’ skill sets with your business needs? To get buy-in from your workforce, you’ll need exciting, engaging strategies for long-term success. Here’s how focusing on career development can drive measurable results.
If your attrition rate is trending upward
When you boost your training where it matters most, you prepare your organization for fluctuating attrition trends. One finding showed that 88% of organizations are concerned about retention. Identifying and tracking your most valued skills can help you create a skills-focused training plan that minimizes the skills drain caused by employee turnover.
Consider these top 10 skills reported by LinkedIn as the most valuable—and hardest to replace:
- Business strategy
- Strategic planning
- Sales management
- Project planning
- Operations management
- Marketing strategy
- Management
- Business development
- Negotiation
- Team leadership
Do any of these skills stand out as a risk for your organization? You’ll notice that many of these topics require a multidimensional approach: great teamwork requires emotional intelligence, actionable business strategy demands negotiation skills, etc. Career development programs equip employees with well-rounded training plans that safeguard your business when top talent leaves the company.
Use AI to create courses for high-value skills
If career progression is considered a nice-to-have
What gets measured, gets managed. To build a resilient workforce, LinkedIn encourages L&D professionals to dig deeper than just tracking the top two metrics of employee engagement (72%) and retention (64%)—and the key is to link career progression to productivity and profits.
How do they do it?
LinkedIn reports several ways career development champions are focused on skills:
- Analyzing internal data and resources to pinpoint skill gaps
- Developing career paths with necessary skills and recommended courses
- Collaborating with executives to align training programs with business objectives
- Partnering with talent acquisition or HR teams to define skills for workforce planning
- Use skill assessments to confirm competency levels
Consider this example. Retail technology conglomerate Rakuten created Optimism University to address the unique learning needs of each employee. By tracking employee data across regions, roles, and business functions, Rakuten gained deep visibility into global skills gaps. This allowed them to refine role-based career pathways while also reducing administrative tasks associated with delivering learning.
What’s their secret sauce? Faster upskilling with AI-driven personalized learning. According to the Workplace Learning Report, 71% of L&D pros are already exploring and experimenting with integrating AI in their daily tasks, but embedding AI into your career development program will truly set you apart from non-champions.
Take a peek at how to set up and track career progression data
If managers are an untapped resource
A career-driven workforce starts with support from managers. But do they have the time or resources to develop each employee’s career mindset? LinkedIn says there is work to do, and managers are “stretched too thin to go beyond their daily work”.
Even employees are taking notice. The report found that managers aren’t acting on the value that learning brings to their team as much as employees would like. Over time, the percentage of employees who say learning and career development is a priority for their managers has decreased significantly.
Here’s how learning engagement has declined since 2024:
- 6% fewer employees say their manager encouraged them to spend time learning
- 5% decrease in employees who felt challenged to learn new skills
- 5% drop in employees whose managers helped them develop a career plan
LinkedIn labeled this a dramatic drop, and with good reason. It’s a sign that L&D teams can confidently invest in automated career development solutions that save the manager time and enhance learning—especially in areas where employees are actively seeking support.
If your GAI adoption is low and slow
Career development may be the key to accelerating AI adoption, yet there is a gap between belief and action. According to the state of learning report, 80% of L&D professionals view AI as important in learning strategies, but only 25% factor it in routinely.
At the same time, more employees recognize the value of upskilling, with 68% agreeing that learning helps them adapt to change—a 4% increase from last year. Organizations that prioritize career development are seeing real benefits in agility and innovation. In fact, 51% of career development champions consider their organization a frontrunner in GAI adoption—compared to just 36% of those with less developed career programs.
Learn how Atlassian skyrocketed AI adoption
Use these insights to take action
The 2025 Workplace Learning report shows us that career development is still critical for tackling the skills crisis and boosting employee engagement, retention, and innovation. With career development technology and AI solutions, you can create personalized learning paths, foster internal mobility, and demonstrate clear business impact. Companies prioritizing career development see high confidence in attracting and retaining talent, and better adoption of new technologies like GAI.
To stay ahead, L&D pros should ask:
- How can we better align our career development programs with our organization's business strategy to drive measurable outcomes like retention and productivity?
- What technologies, like AI-driven personalized learning, can we integrate into our current L&D initiatives to accelerate upskilling and close skill gaps faster?
- Are our managers equipped with the resources and support they need to prioritize career development and mentorship, or do we need to invest in automated solutions to help?
Most importantly, start thinking beyond traditional metrics. Integrating career progression into your L&D strategy will help your workforce stay competitive, engaged, and ready for the next wave of innovation.
