Top 10 L&D Challenges in 2025 – And How to Overcome Them

Now that we have entered the new year, many of us in the learning profession are already reflecting on the challenges and opportunities ahead in 2025.

Amid the inevitable buzz about trends and predictions, many of L&D’s core challenges will stay the same. Viewing these challenges as growth opportunities will help us make a real impact in 2025 – especially with the right strategies, approaches, and tools in our kit. With that in mind, let’s review the top 10 challenges L&D professionals are anticipating in 2025 and how to overcome them.

1. Strategic AI Adoption in L&D

AI and machine learning will continue to promise efficiencies and innovations for L&D in 2025. Embracing this requires learning professionals to learn new skills and gain an understanding of what these tools can do, how they do it, when it’s time to include them in your learning program, and most importantly, why.

How to tackle this challenge

AI’s continued growth means this won’t be a challenge you can ignore. Your first step is essentially understanding why you might adopt AI, whether that’s improving the learner experience, boosting efficiency, automating production workflow, reducing the admin burden, or something else entirely. Make sure you don’t fall into the trap of just using it because you feel like you should. To meet this challenge, you must:

• Define Objectives: Clearly articulate what you aim to achieve with AI.
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• Assess Integration: Determine how AI fits into your existing tech infrastructure, checking for availability within current tools.
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• Identify Benefits: Pinpoint where AI can deliver real, measurable value to your organization.
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• Pilot and Test: Plan pilot programs to test for incremental improvements and gather data before wider implementation.
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• Demonstrate Value: Ensure you can prove AI's value through pilot programs before scaling up.
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• Upskill Your Team: Equip your team to utilize AI tools effectively, whether through training or hands-on experimentation.

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2. Enhancing Learner Engagement for Busy Schedules

Capturing and maintaining learner engagement, especially with shrinking attention spans, remains a top challenge for 2025. Understanding how learners engage – content interaction, learning times, devices used – is crucial to boosting engagement.

How to tackle this challenge

Understanding your audience is key to addressing low engagement. Common barriers include lack of time, difficulty finding content, and unclear priorities. If these are impacting your learners, consider:

• Microlearning for Time-Strapped Learners: Break down lengthy content into bite-sized modules using content repurposing software.  For example, supplement eLearning with 2-minute video explainers or checklists for busy employees.
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• Improve Content Findability: Restructure your learning platform for easy search, discovery, and access. A knowledge base can enhance content accessibility.
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• Personalized Learning Paths: Create role-based learning paths to offer a more relevant experience. Tailor content to specific teams, like marketing or operations.
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• Just-in-Time, Responsive Design: Ensure training is accessible when and where learners need it. Design for true responsiveness, recognizing learners use various devices, including phones, even if laptops are provided.

3. Personalizing Learning and Adapting to Individual Needs

It’s no secret that personalized learning is significantly more impactful and effective than generic, one-size-fits-all learning. Personalization can encompass everything from customized learning paths to adapting to individual learning needs to accommodating accessibility needs to providing content in learners’ native languages – sounds like a lot of work, right?

How to tackle this challenge

This challenge requires smart planning from L&D teams – and again, the right tech will help you streamline the personalization process. Single-source design should be a top priority for creating learning once that ticks all the boxes, which can then be tailored and distributed in all the right places for each audience. Once again, knowing your audience goes a long way toward being able to sufficiently personalize your learning offering, with three achievable areas to address first: 

• Targeted Audience Content: Personalizing your content based on the nuances of different audiences can greatly increase the relevance and impact across your entire organization. With this approach you can easily tag individual page elements, pages, or topics that are unique to a given audience, all while maintaining a single course. In short, achieving personalization at scale!
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• Dynamic Content Variables: Sometimes micro audience changes for specific words or elements within your content can best be achieved through the use of global and project-level variables. Combined with target audience tagging, you have a powerful arsenal at your fingertips that will enable you to create those unique personalized learning experiences.
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• Accessibility Standards: Ensure your content adheres to accessibility standards (such as WCAG) to maximize inclusivity for your entire audience, including alt text, color contrast, and easy navigation.
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• Multi-Language Support: Delivering content in learners’ native languages will both personalize the learning experience and help maximize the impact of your program by ensuring everyone fully understands your content with no language barriers.

4. Rapid Content Creation and Distribution

Many learning teams find it hard to create and distribute learning content as fast as it’s needed. Smaller teams in particular can struggle to keep up with demand for new content – especially for unplanned changes (such as new or updated regulatory guidelines requiring additional compliance training).

How to tackle this challenge

Creating and distributing learning at a fast pace will always be a priority for L&D teams, and today’s learning technology means it’s much more achievable now than ever before. Starting with a centralized, single-source content solution is the first step towards maintaining this pace. While the use of single-source design and reuse provide a big assist, here are three other key approaches:

• Streamlined SME Collaboration: Having a centralized all-in-one solution enables you to easily engage your SMEs at a moment's notice, ensuring they have review access to the latest changes, even as you make them, and you can see their feedback directly within your authoring environment. You can also ensure slick collaboration between multiple authors or content contributors. This seamless approach reduces the time commitment on busy SME schedules as well as content developers.
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• Dynamic Content Delivery: When learners need to be trained on new or updated regulations, you need that updated training out ASAP. Failure to train in a timely manner can result in expensive consequences. Look for a dynamic delivery solution where you can instantly push out all updates to all training systems without tedious extra steps – for instance, using SCORM stubs (using a tool like dominKnow’s Convey) will allow you to bypass the painful LMS update routine, so your training can now keep up with the speed of business.
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• Modular Content Repurposing: Very often, time-sensitive content needs to come in multiple formats to maximize reach and impact. Opting for a more modular approach to content creation ensures that you can easily repurpose your existing content, helping you get your learning out faster.

5. Scaling L&D with Tight Budgets

It’s no surprise that L&D budgets will, once again, be squeezed in 2025. The need to “do more with less” has never been more important, as tighter budgets come with a need to scale learning and development programs.

How to tackle this challenge

One of the key aspects of a budget is to look at your biggest overall expenses. In almost all cases this is your personnel and their time. In short, you need to empower them to be more efficient, while still being able to create impactful learning. Your first step should be less about the tooling cost and more about how you can optimize your team's current workflows and increase overall effectiveness. With these factors in mind, seek to identify solutions that can address these workflow improvements. When embarking on this you should:

• Workflow Bottleneck Analysis: Where and with whom does your team spend the most time/money on your content production, management and maintenance (e.g. does it take too long to build learning, do you waste time waiting for reviewers’ responses, or is distributing updates too time consuming)?
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• ●Workflow Optimization Solutions: Better configurations and integrations could help you get more value from your existing tools. Alternatively, it could be time to find a solution that does more of what you need in a single platform, replacing multiple tools and streamlining processes for greater efficiency.
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• Learning Tech Stack Audit: The way we’ve always done something isn’t always the best way. Are all of your platforms and tools working as hard as they could be to get you the ROI you need? When you open yourself to new workflows, are your existing solutions hampering adoption? Are there overlaps between tools that could be consolidated for cost savings? Conducting a full audit of your learning technology will help you understand which tools aren’t pulling their weight.

6. Adapting to Rapid Tech Changes

In 2024, we saw the launch of many new learning tools and an influx of AI. However, this rapid technological change doesn’t just apply to learning technology. It affects every single sector, from healthcare to hospitality, leaving employees with a growing need to upskill and reskill to keep up with new technologies in their industry. Having the ability to create and distribute new content to train employees to use these new technologies will be an invaluable way to keep up with the rapid pace of tech change throughout 2025.

How to tackle this challenge

If you’re worried about keeping up with this rapid rate of change, some of your 2025 actions could include:

• L&D Team Upskilling: Upskilling the L&D team, including staying informed about the latest technological advancements in your industry, will help you deliver genuinely useful training that helps your people keep up with the latest job-critical tools and technology, making them more productive and effective at their jobs. Don’t forget, habits are started with small, consistent changes!
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• Skills-Based Training Approach: Beyond the technology itself, understanding the new skills required to use the new technologies will ensure your people are equipped with all the skills they need to succeed, no matter what technology comes next.
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• Continuous Learning Culture: Highlight the need for employees to proactively seek out new learning opportunities and for SMEs to share the latest news and knowledge about emerging technologies in your space – for instance, finding training workshops, useful industry conferences, or seeking out mentorship opportunities, and embrace approaches that empower SMEs to contribute to your organization’s knowledge.

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7. Training Hybrid Workforces

The hybrid and remote workforce is going nowhere. As organizations settle into managing on-site and remote employees, a challenge in 2025 will be ensuring that all employees have access to the training they need, no matter where they are.

How to tackle this challenge

If your organization has switched to a hybrid-first approach, key considerations to keep everyone informed and skilled include:

• Optimize Delivery Methods: Instead of multi-session instructor-led training (ILT) courses, consider switching to hybrid approaches, with ILT and VLT options combined with learner guides and eLearning to support everyone. Don’t forget, single-source design and reusing your existing content are your friends in accomplishing these changes efficiently.
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• Location-Specific Content: Hybrid models often mean that your employees are subject to different state or province standards. Providing targeted access to location-specific content (such as safety regulations in different countries) will ensure that everyone has what they need, when they need it, without having to travel for in-person training, which will also help save time and money.

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8. Measuring Impact and ROI

The increasing demand for efficiency and demonstrating ROI is pushing L&D teams to adopt more rigorous approaches to measuring the impact of their programs. This trend has reignited interest in advanced learning analytics, particularly through access to xAPI data. When implemented correctly, this data can demonstrate the tangible impact of learning initiatives on business outcomes, justify investments, and continuously improve program effectiveness.

How to tackle this challenge

L&D professionals are typically much better at designing and delivering learning content than we are at measuring the impact, and thesis an area where we can all improve in 2025. To do this, consider taking steps such as:

• Leadership Alignment: Working closely with your senior leadership team ensures you can link your learning objectives with your overarching business goals – and in turn, you can demonstrate how your learning programs are impacting ROI and the success of the wider business.
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• Reporting-Rich Technology: Selecting platforms with great reporting functionality (particularly the ability to auto-generate and distribute customized reports) will help us keep an eye on what’s working, what’s not, and how to focus our efforts to improve in 2025.
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• xAPI Implementation: xAPI provides richer data for L&D teams that extends beyond the LMS, ensuring you can capture more results from your learning activities. Few learning platforms currently support xAPI out of the box, so choosing an LCMS like dominKnow | ONE with xAPI support will ensure you don’t miss out on any valuable learning data – no matter the source.

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9. Managing Content en Masse

Today’s L&D teams are managing increasingly large amounts of content, which becomes exponentially larger when you consider the unique variations of each asset (such as different audiences, languages, or locations). Couple this with an increased reliance on shorter, and thus a larger number of, content pieces, and we are all starting to face our own personal content tsunamis. More content is great, but now it is becoming harder to keep track of it all, leading to inconsistencies, duplication of effort, and confusion for learners. That’s why in 2025, developing an approach to maintaining large quantities of high-quality, up-to-date learning materials must be a priority for every L&D team.

How to tackle this challenge

The secret to efficiently managing large amounts of learning content is getting the right technology in place. While your learning management systems may be managing the end product, most content creation solutions don’t provide the same types of capabilities. This is where aLearning Content Management System (LCMS) comes in. The primary purpose of an LCMS is to enable your team to efficiently and effectively create, manage, and deliver large amounts of content. An LCMS can help you with:

• Centralized Organization: With extensive tagging, categorization and searching options, you can finally centralize your content organization so everyone can find what they need and you can reduce the regular occurrence when someone creates a new content element and another team member notes “We already had that asset…somewhere”.
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• Efficient Content Reuse: There’s nothing more efficient than not doing something twice. Your LCMS will make it easier to find and reuse specific elements of content for different use cases, and makes it easy to update all instances in a single step.
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• Enhanced Content Control: With great amounts of content comes great responsibility. Your team members and outside contributors can be assigned access to only what content they need and provided only the appropriate edit options. Permissions and access control will become your secret weapon.
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• Regular Content Audits: Auditing your content ensures you can retire or update out-of-date content, reducing "clutter” across your platforms and keeping everything tidy, easy to manage, and easy to find. Setting a recurring calendar reminder will ensure you remember to carry out a content audit every 6 or 12 months to make sure everything is up to date. While you can do this without an LCMS, an LCMS with its content reporting will make this infinitely easier and provide you with greater accuracy.

10. Ensuring Data Privacy and Security

In 2024 alone, an alarming 83% of companies fell victim to digital security breaches. With so many new technologies hitting the market, there will always be a sense of nervousness around data security and privacy. The new wave of AI tools in particular could pose new challenges for data privacy in 2025 –for instance, what will happen to the sensitive data you train your AI tools on? And can you be 100% confident that they’re set up to keep learner data safe?

How to tackle this challenge

While data security has always been a concern for L&D, we’re now looking beyond the LMS to build more complex, integrated, and often AI-enhanced, learning ecosystems. With this in mind, some of the things we should do this year to ensure our data stays safe and secure include:

• Vendor Security Assessments: Work with your IT team to ensure the security of the entire software supply chain every single time you introduce a new tool to your learning tech stack to ensure there are no security risks or vulnerabilities
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• AI User Disclaimers and Policies: If you’re using AI-powered learning solutions, be sure to make this clear to your end users, and set out any policies (such as not using the tool to share confidential company data) upfront. Adding a disclaimer to allow learners to opt in or out of AI solutions ensures they’re informed about how their data is being used.
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• Cybersecurity Training Investments: As technology becomes more advanced, methods for gaining unauthorized access to data are also becoming more sophisticated. Building cybersecurity training into your compliance program, including interactive simulations, will ensure everyone knows what risks and threats to look out for.

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Solving 2025 Learning Challenges and Beyond

To proactively address your 2025 learning challenges, remember that improvement is a continuous journey.

First, define the key gaps between your current processes and solutions and the goals you will need to meet. Once you break these down, you are likely to start seeing some key required changes emerging, such as embracing single-source design, providing adaptive learning, providing better enablement of collaboration, or leveraging and organizing your existing content more effectively.

 Even changes requiring bigger efforts can be worth prioritizing if they’re going to make a significant impact to your content approach. If you can find a cohesive software solution to unify content production workflows, this will help to take the sting out of those high-effort changes you need to make.

 A baseline approach to achieving many of these goals will likely mean embracing a centralized LCMS with robust authoring like dominKnow | ONE. These types of solutions enable you to author, manage, and publish content across all your learner channels, including your LMS, LXP, intranet, or even your website. With an LCMS you can streamline the content workflow from start to finish, from building to repurposing to distributing content, helping your people realize their full potential in 2025.

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Make the First Step

Ready to tackle your 2025 learning challenges? We’d love to help!

Discover how dominKnow | ONE can help you address these challenges head-on and make 2025 your most successful year of eLearning yet.

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