What do learning professionals think are the most important skills we need over the next three years?
We asked our peers, all learning professionals. Nearly 200 of them across sectors, career levels, and regions answered in the spring of 2026. They told us what skills they think they need, how they want to develop them, and where their priorities diverge from what their employers seem to value.
Some of what they said confirmed what we suspected. Some of it surprised us. Here are some highlights from the data.
Voices from the field
Here are some quotes from the open text responses. We can relate, and we think these speak volumes about the perceived state of the learning industry.
Reason for Optimism
“AI doesn’t make humans less important. It makes humanity critical.”
– Tianna Tagami Technology Solutions Advisor, Mosaic
“The industry doesn’t need more courses. It needs better capability systems powered by wise humans partnering with powerful AI.”
– Matthew Harris
“The most important competency is learning how to learn. It empowers education professionals to be prepared for the future, especially for the technologies that are yet to come.”
– Fernando Luís Merízio Higher Education Professor, UNIFEBE
“Our field is moving beyond just building courses and more toward helping people build capability in real time.”
– Jacques Morin Senior Manager, WGU
“The imperative is going to shift from ‘what can I learn’ to ‘how can I prove that I know what I know, and can do what I say I can do.’”
– Megan Jackson Head of Client Solutions, Traverse
Reason for Concern
“What concerns me most isn’t that AI will make our work obsolete. It’s that we’ll let it.”
– Alina Timofte Instructional Designer, HOCH Health Ostschweiz
“I feel like I’m being set up to fail.”
– Mandy Hagee Senior Learning Experience Designer
“My biggest professional fear is that I’ll become obsolete.”
– Eric Poandl Curriculum Manager, LinkedIn
“Learning is bought by the yard, minutes, days, content blocks, instead of on the basis of business outcomes.”
– Anonymous
“The tyranny of the urgent continues to limit the time I have to stop, think, plan, implement, evaluate/assess, and try again.”
– Anonymous
Finding
The traditional production skills ranked at the bottom, with one exception: AI tools and automation.
Respondents were asked to rate nine skills on a five-point scale (where 5 = highest importance). These skills were purposefully chosen to represent recognizable skills to learning professionals. Both technical and durable skills were mixed in, and the durable, technical, and bridge labels were not shown in the survey.
The nine skills we asked about, colored by type. Download the report to see the full ranking.
Finding
Practitioners value “storytelling and narrative design” significantly more than they believe their employers do.
Practitioners and their employers are not valuing the same things. One skill shows a wide, consistent gap between what practitioners believe matters and what they think their employers reward. And one skill runs the other way entirely.
This report is the start of something larger. The findings here are shaping a cross-sector skills roadmap and the events we are building for the profession.
Get your report here: