Executive Summary: 2025 State of Workflow Learning Annual Survey
The 2025 State of Workflow Learning (WFL) Annual Survey gathered insights from 70 learning and development (L&D) professionals across various industries and company sizes. The survey aims to assess the maturity, adoption, and impact of workflow learning and “Performance-First” strategies within Learning Organizations.
In an era where L&D organizations are increasingly challenged to align learning with performance, the 2025 State of Workflow Learning Annual Survey attempts to offer a timely snapshot of how L&D teams are evolving. The survey explores the current state of workflow learning, the adoption of performance-first strategies, and the integration of emerging technologies like AI and Digital Coaches. The findings reveal both progress and longstanding legacy gaps in how Learning Organizations support learning in the flow of work, measure impact, and leverage innovation to truly drive business outcomes. This shift is imperative if L&D is to evolve, grow, and remain strategic/viable.
To access the complete survey results, click here.
Key Findings:
- Team Composition and Size: Most L&D teams are small, even if they support a large population. Their makeup continues to be dominated by Instructional Designers and Trainers.
- 50% of respondents work in L&D teams with 1–10 members.
- The most common roles include Instructional Designers (71%), Trainers (59%), and Managers (57%).
- Stakeholder Engagement: We’ve come a long way in this area! Covid played a huge role in this, and it appears that L&D has continued to hold its ground.[1]
- 51% of teams have a seat at the table with stakeholders most of the time, indicating strong strategic involvement.
- Workflow Learning Maturity: The trend seems to be pointing at an overall attempt to implement Workflow Learning, but the data strongly suggests that there’s a difference between desired state and current state.
- 54% of organizations are at Level 3 maturity, actively implementing job performance support in specific areas.
- Only 9% have fully integrated the 5 Moments of Need (5 MoN) approach across their organization.
- Performance-First Mindset: Implementing WFL is all about “the ask” from those L&D serves. That begins with L&D moving beyond buy-in and to a mindset of creating, or being allowed to create, performance-first deliverables. This category has a long way to go and needs to be a focus in the coming year(s).
- 54% report that only a small percentage of their solutions are performance-first.
- Just 16% say performance-first is the dominant mindset.
- Budget Allocation: Money talks! When we look at the spend/investment in deliverables, budgets still lean into formal instruction first, reinforcing the work needed to be done in area 4 above.
- 37% allocate 90% of their budget to formal instruction, with only 10% going to workflow learning.
- A balanced 50/50 split is seen in 26% of organizations.
- Use of Digital Coaches (DC): Although the DC supplier side continues to mature, L&D lags in its ability, and potentially in its desire, to include a DC as a lead deliverable in its learning and support solutions.
- Only 27% include a Digital Coach in their learning solutions.
- Among those, tools like SharePoint, AskDelphi, and tts are commonly used.
- Measuring Impact: This is a huge blind spot for L&D, and has been for years, if not decades. If L&D is not measuring business impact, L&D will remain irrelevant and be seen as an expense vs. an investment. WFL is proven to enable an L&D team to show business impact. As the trends above show, L&D isn’t delivering enough WFL to begin to make advancements here.
- 29% do not measure the impact of workflow learning at all.
- 40% measure it very limitedly, while only 11% do so as much as they can.
- Common metrics tracked include productivity gain (60%), time savings (55%), and time to competency (48%).
- AI in Learning: L&D needs to move beyond content development shortcuts via generative AI and begin creating AI Agents/deliverables that enable DC capabilities.
- 49% use AI in 10–25% of content development.
- Platforms include ChatGPT, Copilot, Synthesia, and internal AI tools.
- However, 84% report 0% AI usage in content delivery.
- Organizational Demographics:
- 86% of respondents work in companies with 250+ employees.
- The most represented industries include Manufacturing (14%), Healthcare (11%), and Finance (11%).
- 36% selected “Other,” indicating a wide range of niche or cross-industry applications.
[1] https://www.cipd.org/globalassets/media/knowledge/knowledge-hub/reports/impact-covid-19-ld-profession_tcm18-92209.pdf