Learning content curation is evolving

Published in March 2026, the Fosway 9-Grid™ for Digital Learning looks at the learning content market for EMEA’s business leaders – here, Fosway analysts look at the improvements in learning content curation.

Content curation has long been a major hygiene factor in digital learning. Typically, this has allowed administrators to create and manage pathways and playlists, clustering content around topics and skills. Vendors are now taking this further than the UX alone, allowing customers to present content resources and collections more clearly in the context of their organisation.

Adding customer content resources to collections, editing off-the-shelf resources with local case examples and adding messages from sponsors and internal experts have become more commonplace features of content library services. Increasingly, intelligent search is helping to identify and extract the value within content packages and course wrappers, reducing frustration in finding results and getting to relevant learning quickly.

Consulting capability is growing in importance

As we have seen in the last few years, customers are under pressure to focus on the actual value of their solutions above their basic delivery. Closer scrutiny is making genuine advisory services from vendors more valuable, and the capability to identify and describe what a valuable outcome looks like, and to measure and monitor whether it has been achieved, is becoming more central to customer requirements.

Consultative selling is an established approach to focus on achievable and useful results. In the custom segment, particularly for enterprise customers, a strong consulting capability has become a must have, but is often still a weakness of many vendors. Progressive customers want suppliers to reach beyond strategic learning design and into business strategy itself, and solution design that demonstrates to all stakeholders that desired impact is understood and can be addressed is vital. Relationship management, critical enquiry and business acumen are all capabilities that stand out, adding to the foundation of demonstrable human-centred design expertise.

Managed services are growing in importance

Larger customers with constrained resources but rising demands are increasingly looking for flexible capacity and resourcing to meet their growing needs. As with consulting services, many businesses with a broad service range and a strong heritage in custom solutions are targeting managed services as a way to secure longer-term contracts and deepen customer relationships. The major managed learning services providers have deep pockets to invest in AI-powered data capability at scale to manage services efficiently, analyse resource utilisation and extract greater value from a wider range of their existing resources, content and knowledge sources with AI tools.

A long-neglected corner of the market, content management, is fast becoming a core capability as the volumes of content to be handled rise and the range of possible formats and solutions available from it increase. In larger enterprise settings, real personalisation at scale relies on this ability and services that can solve this challenge have an advantage.

This is an excerpt from the Fosway 9-Grid™ for Digital Learning. Get the full insight and discover all the latest market and solution trends by reading the whole report here.

What should you do next?

• New this week: Fosway’s Digital Learning Realities 2026 research – browse the first cluster of infographics today.
• You can read the full 9-Grid™ for Digital Learning report here – learning content market insight that no other analyst can match.

Other recommended reading

• AI is supercharging self-study – Fosway analysts look at self-study in digital learning.
• Build your AI strategy with evidence, not guesswork. All our published research so far is here >> Fosway AI Strategic Research Programme

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