Pressures both inside and outside your organization invariably keep upskilling and reskilling on the agenda. In this article, Anastasia Fete, Senior Director of Product Marketing at PeopleFluent, selects six stand-out insights from the PeopleFluent-sponsored HR.com ‘Future of Upskilling and Employee Learning’ report. Read on to discover how organizations are straying from best practices, and learn from those creating the highest-quality programs.

1) Prioritizing Upskilling Doesn’t Always Guarantee Quality

Encouragingly, organizations appear to be largely prioritizing upskilling. Though a somewhat disconcerting 27% of respondents said they felt that their top leadership didn’t have upskilling among their top priorities, the remaining 73% believe it was in leadership’s top ten priorities. Of this 73%, 39% said it was at least a top-three priority, and 18% said it was the top priority.

Respondents do appear to believe that HR professionals and employees are more likely to prioritize upskilling—they claim that 41% and 43% hold it as a top-three priority, respectively. But the overall picture for intent is positive. Indeed, around 69% believe that upskilling will become even more important by the end of 2027.

However, intent to upskill isn’t necessarily matched by quality of upskilling initiatives at this time. Though 88% say that at least some of the employees in their organization are upskilled or reskilled in any given year, the report emphasizes that only 21% of respondents would give their program an eight out of ten or above. Efforts are generally seen as mediocre rather than outright bad—59% gave a rating between five to seven out of ten—but the level of discontent should nonetheless be concerning for the organizations implicated.

Figure 1: Responses to the question “How high a priority is upskilling among the following groups in your organization?”

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2) Very Few Organizations Have a Reskilling Response for AI

When asked what percentage of jobs and roles they expected would be substantially disrupted by market or technological trends over the next two years, respondents’ predictions were relatively conservative: 26% estimated between 0% and 20%, with an additional 24% estimating between 21% to 40%.

The biggest single group of replies (29%) came from those who said they simply don’t know—something the report remarks “may limit their ability to adequately prepare their workforce for future changes”. It’s also a sign of continuing uncertainty about when and how new innovations will disrupt the status quo.

At any rate, HR’s chief motivators for upskilling remain much the same as ever. When asked which four needs are the most important for driving upskilling, the following came out on top:

• Developing careers (63%)
• Retaining employees (61%)
• Boosting employee engagement (43%)
• Boosting job performance (42%)

Accommodating technological changes was relatively low on the list—just 33% of respondents selected it among their options. This is reflected in organizations’ alleged complacency on reskilling for artificial intelligence specifically. Just 8% of organizations have a plan that is mostly or completely formalized, whereas 19% are relying on a mostly ad-hoc response. Additionally, 35% are stuck in the development stage, and 38% don’t have a response or even intend to develop one.

Figure 2: Responses to the question “What four needs are most important in driving upskilling in your organization?”

3) Many Organizations Aren’t Adhering to L&D Best Practices

General discontent about upskilling program quality can be at least partially attributed to the absence of key learning practices in many responses. Those surveyed were given a list of ten learning and development best practices and asked which their organizations had implemented. Only four broke past 50%:

• Ensure that remote learning is possible (54%)
• Consider employees’ professional interests, goals, and learning styles (54%)
• Assess employees’ needs and gaps in skills/knowledge (51%)
• Develop career paths involving competencies and skills (50%)

This leaves some quite fundamental practices—providing regular feedback to employees (45%), matching learning to future talent management needs (38%), defining measurable objectives for the learning program (37%)—to be surprisingly scarce at the organizations surveyed.

Figure 3: Responses to the question “Which of the following practices does your organization engage in while designing/implementing the learning and development processes?”

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4) Most Organizations Have Significant Ground to Cover Before They Implement a True Culture of Learning

With all of this considered, it’s not entirely unexpected that only 30% of respondents believe that employees are satisfied with their organization’s learning culture. And in fact, a similar examination of ten elements integral to organizational cultures that support learning and upskilling received mixed results. No option was selected by a clear majority, and the top four practices were:

• Allowing all employees access to learning (47%)
• Encouraging everyone to teach others and share what they know (44%)
• Stressing the role of learning in career development (43%)
• Communicating the importance of learning (42%)

Otherwise, important elements of learning culture establishment—such as “attaching learning goals to performance goals” and “providing opportunities to experiment and try new skills”—were allegedly used by only around one-third of organizations.

Figure 4: Responses to the question “How does your corporate culture support learning/upskilling?”

5) HR Pros Report Upskilling-Related Improvements Across Performance, Engagement, and Retention

Nonetheless, respondents are broadly in agreement that upskilling and reskilling have been beneficial for their organization. 68% stated that upskilling and reskilling had resulted in substantial improvements to job performance, and over 50% said the same for employee engagement (60%), employee retention (59%), organizational performance (56%), and career mobility (54%). This suggests that upskilling has multifaceted benefits for the organizations that prioritize it.

Figure 5: Responses to the question “In your organization, upskilling has resulted in substantial improvements in:”

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6) Leading L&D Departments Are Better at Measurement and a Range of Training Methods and Tactics

With just 21% of respondents giving their upskilling program an 8 out of 10 for overall quality, it’s worth considering what they believe their organizations are doing right. As is common for an HR.com report, the rating given in this early question is used to differentiate between “leaders” and “laggards” (though a rating of 7 out of 10 and above was used for the “leaders” group). This group gestures towards practices that could be considered drivers of higher-quality programs.

This year’s report found that L&D leaders were:

• Six times more likely to use learner satisfaction scores to measure the impact of their upskilling initiatives
• Two times more likely to be planning the use of microlearning strategies by the end of 2027
• Two times more likely to use a wider variety of practices when supporting their learning channels, including developing competency-based career paths and matching learning to future talent needs
• More likely to rate employee skills highly across all roles and functions

Even More Insights Into the Future of Upskilling Await

These are just six of the insights from the 2025 ‘Future of Upskilling and Employee Learning’ report. The full 50-page report provides an even more comprehensive dive into the survey questions, additionally revealing differences according to organizational size and some further characteristics of high-performing L&D departments. It also recommends eight actions based on the data. Get your copy today!