Skills management is the biggest ecosystem issue

Published in November 2025, Fosway Group’s Digital Learning Realities research analyses all the critical trends and opportunities for learning leaders in the next 12 months. Here, Fosway analysts look at skills management and the latest learning ecosystem trends.

As skills and capability management becomes a strategic imperative for many organisations, and as they begin to think about how they will transition to the future world of work, skills management continues to languish near the bottom of the solutions that are very standardised. For skills and capabilities to work, there needs to be consistency across the employee lifecycle and today too many teams risk disaster by not working to rationalise the skills and work ontology question.

In future, as task-based organisations begin to become the underpinning concept of work, this may yet become a momentary and evolutionary problem – but if you are executing a skills-based organisation today or the near future – you risk plunging your organisation into constant confusion if you cannot provide continuity in your capability journeys.

Learning teams are struggling with their biggest opportunities

An inability to build an effective ecosystem for skills, career development and future workforce contributes to L&D’s identity as a transactional function. When it comes to creating business transformation less than one in four claim any success with skills and less two in five think they have been very successful at supporting career development.

As a result, L&D teams risk marginalisation if they do not provide the people transformations at scale that makes their workforce fit for the future. Marry this with a systemic inability to report value and evidence impact, and learning teams are at risk of becoming more of a transactional function, when their organisations need them to be even more influential.

Video is seen as the most successful learning content

Effective innovation with learning content has been slow, with most L&D teams rating traditional approaches as their most successful again this year. In fact, there has been no significant movement in the top four learning content formats for the past four years. Equally L&D teams’ success with more progressive and engaging learning content remains at the fringe – with success limited to a few innovators.

This is an excerpt from the Digital Learning Realities 2025. Get the full insight and discover all the latest insight for corporate learning leaders by reading the whole report here.

What should you do next?

• Digital Learning Realities 2026 is now open. Add your voice, share your experience.
• Fosway can help make AI work for you in 2026 and beyond. Contact us for more; join Fosway’s strategic AI project for 2026: ‘AI in Learning’.

Other recommended reading

• Build your AI strategy with evidence, not guesswork. Fosway AI Strategic Research Programme
• The 2026 Fosway 9-Grid^TM for Learning Systems – full report. The latest word on EMEA’s learning systems landscape.

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