In the spring of 2026, Jackrabbit Learning Experience asked 197 learning professionals a deceptively simple question: which skills do you think will matter most for your work in the next three years?
The people who answered came from higher education, corporate L&D, workforce development, K-12, government, nonprofits, and consulting. They ranged from people just starting their careers to CLOs with decades of experience. They came from six regions around the world. And they were surveyed at a moment when, as James Altman puts it, “AI news as it relates to learning comes out every single week.”
The results did not produce a clean answer. They produced something more interesting: three statistical tiers that nobody asked for, a pair of gaps that tell a quiet story about the health of the profession, and one open-text response that Jason Gorman describes as a gut punch every time he reads it.
James Altman, co-founder of Jackrabbit Learning Experience and the architect of the survey, joined Gorman on The Learning Experience Ops Show to unpack what they found and what it means for where the field goes next.
Listen to the podcast on your favorite directory:
Three Tiers Emerged from the Data
The survey asked respondents to rate nine skill items individually on a scale of zero to five. Nobody was asked to rank them against each other or sort them into groups. And yet, when the data came back, three distinct statistical tiers emerged on their own.
The top tier contained three items whose mean scores were close enough that no analysis could separate them: learning strategy and design thinking, stakeholder influence and strategic communication, and AI tools and automation. Two of these are durable skills. One is technical. All three sat above a mean of four out of five.
The bottom tier also contained three items: facilitation and delivery, learning technology including LMS and authoring tools, and content development. These are things that many learning professionals have built their careers around. They still rated above three out of five, so nobody called them unimportant. But a full point separated them from the top tier, and statistically, the gap held up under every analysis Altman ran.
“Two technical skills,” Altman says. “Things that I’ve built my career on in a very concrete way. Bottom tier.”
The middle tier, containing change management and organizational development alongside storytelling and narrative design and data analysis and reporting, was where some of the most revealing patterns lived.
The Gaps That Tell the Real Story
The survey asked respondents not only to rate the skills themselves but also to estimate how their employers would rate the same skills. The divergence that emerged in two particular areas is worth dwelling on.
Storytelling and narrative design was rated a full point higher by learning professionals than they believed their employers would rate it. Data analysis and reporting showed the opposite: respondents believed their employers placed more importance on it than they did themselves.
Gorman connects these two patterns directly. Storytelling is hard to measure. It shapes the quality of a learning experience, the memorability of content, the emotional transfer that happens between a well-crafted narrative and a learner. But none of that shows up cleanly in a dashboard. Data analysis, by contrast, is measurable almost by definition. In organizations where learning has always lived on the cost side of the balance sheet, what gets measured gets valued.
Altman laughs about the idea of a goosebumps dashboard, a metric for the number of times a learner has a visceral emotional response to a learning experience, as a way to give storytelling the ROI language that leadership can act on. He is only half joking.
“If you had goosebumps occurring in learning experiences as a metric,” he says, “it’s this wonderful way to connect ROI. We’re measuring the efficacy of storytelling for engagement.”
It is a provocation worth taking seriously. AI may now make it possible to assess the emotional resonance of learning content at a scale that was not previously available. If so, the gap between what learning professionals know matters and what they can prove matters might finally begin to close.
What the 44% Actually Means
Forty-four percent of respondents named something AI-related as the single most important competency for the next three years. It is a dominant number. It is also, Altman argues, an umbrella that hides more than it reveals.
Underneath that 44%, the range of experience and opinion was vast. Some respondents described building fully agentic workflows that take raw content from subject matter experts, match it to learning objectives, generate appropriate assets, and produce near-finished learning material with minimal human intervention. Others described actively resisting all forms of AI and having no intention of changing that.
Between those poles, the open text responses surfaced something that Altman found more striking than any single statistic: the word judgment appeared over and over. Not as a synonym for critical thinking or evaluation, but as its own urgent concern. How do we preserve it? How do we get it back? How do we help colleagues apply it when they are dealing with AI output?
One response stood out from all the others. A single learning professional wrote: “I feel like I am being set up to fail in relation to AI.”
Gorman returns to it repeatedly. It is not an outlier sentiment. It is the clearest articulation of something that was running underneath many of the responses: the sense that the field is being pushed in a direction it has not chosen, faster than it can absorb, without a map.
On Knowing What You Do Not Know
One of the most practically useful ideas in the episode comes not from the survey data but from a conversation Altman had with one of thirteen senior learning professionals he convened in New York to discuss the findings. A man named Diallo, who has worked across technical high school programs and statewide workforce development, offered a piece of advice he gives to people he works with: try not to use AI for something you do not already know how to do.
The nuance matters. Altman refines it in conversation: when it comes to content, at least, if you have never written a strategic plan for a workforce development program, asking AI to write one means you may not be able to tell whether what you receive is good. But if you have contributed to one, you have the judgment to evaluate the output.
The exception, both Altman and Diallo agreed, is technical building: writing scripts to connect systems, automating workflows between tools, vibe coding. Here the result is binary. It worked or it did not. That binary feedback loop creates a safe space for attempting things outside your experience.
The implication for learning design is significant. The question is not whether to use AI. It is whether the person using it has enough foundational knowledge to evaluate what it produces. Which is, perhaps, the best possible argument for investing in exactly the durable skills that sat at the top of the survey.
The Roadmap That Does Not Exist Yet
The survey was not designed to produce a skills roadmap. It was designed to get close enough to one to understand what questions still need answering. Altman is honest about that.
What the data does confirm is that durable skills matter, and that this finding is probably being undervalued in most organizational conversations about talent development. While CFOs are pushing for technical AI training and learning functions are scrambling to respond, the skills that have persisted through every previous disruption are sitting at the top of the rankings among the people who spend their careers thinking about how learning actually works.
Altman’s vision for what comes next involves breaking down the silos between sectors. The K-12 teacher, the corporate L&D director, the workforce development specialist, and the higher ed instructional designer have more in common than the organizational structures that separate them suggest. Years spent across multiple sectors, in his view, produce a practitioner who can serve any learner better precisely because they have seen learning from more angles.
If the roadmap gets built, it probably starts there: with a cross-sector, cross-career-stage conversation about which skills, durable and technical, are worth the field’s collective investment over the next three years. The survey started that conversation. It is not the end of it.
Listen to the full conversation with James Altman on The LX Ops Show or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Podcast Transcript– Jason Gorman with James Altman
Jason Gorman (00:01)
Welcome to the Learning Experience Ops show, where we talk about making learning better that’s future ready. My name is Jason Gorman. I am the founder and CEO of Jackrabbit Learning Experience. Every conversation that I’ve had on this show keeps circling back to the same things about the state of the learning professions. Nobody knows what’s happening next. I mean, we know that our world has already changed a lot. We know that it’s still changing. And we’re pretty sure that more is still coming, but
What do we make of all that? I mean, nobody has an answer. People have answers, but nobody has the answer, and certainly nobody is willing to say that they have the answer. Today, I am very excited to be talking with my business partner at Jackrabbit Learning Experience, James Altman, about a survey that we recently ran. We asked learning professionals a pretty simple question. What skills do you believe will matter the most for the future of this work?
James did 99.9% of the work on the survey and has spent time with leaders in different industries after the survey came out to unpack some of our findings and what a next action might be. I think this is the start of a longer conversation. It’s certainly not the end of one.
Because we still don’t have any definitive answers. But I do think it points to a few things that we should be paying closer attention to, things that could really shape how we think about the future of our own work. So it’s been a little while since we did this, James. Welcome back to the show.
James Altman (01:36)
It has. I’m I’m so glad to be back.
Jason Gorman (01:38)
So as I said, you did the most work on this survey. So let me start with the big obvious question. Why did you do this? Well, what is the survey? Why did you do it and why now?
James Altman (01:51)
Yeah. Yeah, you set it up well, I think, when you started talking about people trying to have the answer and I think that’s what we’re trying to do. It’s it’s deep and perpetual question right now, kind of like what will the future look like? so maybe one thing to talk about is that this this didn’t seek to answer stuff that we will see in five years or ten years, it it was like three at the most. Like how do we
wrap our arms around thirty-six months of time when you said it the other day actually major news as it relates to AI, which as it relates to learning the learning profession and the work that we do comes out every week. whether it’s a new model in kind of the race for models or or whether it’s the adaptation or application of what some of this technology can do.
or build. So the implications are kind of constant. So the survey in terms of why was was just like we all know that our our profession, our colleagues are thinking and working and struggling and and trying things and and why not kind of talk to them at scale, I suppose is one way to put it. Like we have tons of conversations, tons. I think our
Jason Gorman (03:02)
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (03:06)
Companies are really great at meeting with lots of people where they are and having just open, honest conversations through all of our various venues and convenings. But this was like, How can you talk to 197 people in the matter of a couple weeks? And we we did that. So I think that was part of the point. so that’s a bit about why. and I and I started talking about what in terms of the three years, like we’re asking them what.
skills they think are important. So rate each one of these skills on a scale of zero to five, five being very important to you in your job in the next three years. and we give them nine skills. We spent a while trying to think about and validate with others what would be an appropriate set of skills. We did not want them to rate twenty nine skills, which you know, if you go to some taxonomies or competency frameworks, you’d end up having
Jason Gorman (03:51)
Hm.
James Altman (03:56)
Many, many skills. So we tried to get it to a very kind of manageable amount. and then and then there are kind of different areas of the survey asking them a little bit more about themselves, a little bit more about what they think gets in the way of their learning, etc. But that’s kind of the the overarching description of the survey and why now. I think I got 75% of your your questions answered.
Jason Gorman (04:20)
I think so. I think so. You actually answered my follow-up too. I was going ask, what were we actually asking people? And you you just said what we’re actually asking people. I do want to talk about the findings. I actually want to flag something that I really like about where the survey ended up in terms of the responses that we got. You know, the mix of people that answered was pretty good. We had people from higher ed, corporate.
We had consultants, we had people working in nonprofit settings, K-12, government. We had people who were senior in their career, more mid-career folks, and then some folks who are just getting started in their career. six different regions worldwide. So to me, this range is kinda a big part of the point of why we did this in general. I mean, it’s a big part of why we say learning professionals instead of something narrower.
so you and I have had this conversation about do we call the people we’re talking to learning professionals on this podcast and through the survey and in the AI forum that we run? and we have really learned landed on learning professionals. and so while we’ve had this conversation, we’ve never had it on tape. So maybe now’s the time. So since you’re the guest, I’m gonna ask you, I’m gonna ask you first.
Why are we calling the people we’re talking to learning professionals?
James Altman (05:43)
Yeah, I’ll start I’ll start with that. I do wanna jump back to one of the other questions you said, which is or or not questions, but just observations in terms of the span of people that we had. That it was good. it was a lot of work because we were asking a lot of people around the world to fill this out and in order to get that. So I’m just adjusting kind of any potential questions, or maybe I’m actually raising a bunch of questions around the methodology because I
This this was really the first kind of professional survey, industry survey that Jack Rabbit did. ⁓ and I think we learned a lot and there’s a lot more to do. I mean, we could do a whole episode on basically what we’d like to do better. and I’m sure we’ll end with what’s next, and that will definitely be one of the things that’s next. We will do another survey and we will learn and improve from this. So I will comment a little bit about that, but I’m gonna skip around. So then you said why learning professional, and yes, we’ve you and I have debated it.
Jason Gorman (06:14)
Mm-hmm.
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (06:37)
I’ve also had many debates with people as I was thinking about this survey, thinking about how and where the venues yeah.
Jason Gorman (06:44)
Well, can I just
ask a question? Why is it a debate? What can just maybe s we set that up? Yeah.
James Altman (06:48)
Yeah, yeah.
So I don’t know that you can find learning professional out out there. It’s not a it’s not a domain, it’s not a title. ⁓ you don’t become an associate learning professional, a mid career certain profession. You know, you don’t there’s no title for that. What’s interesting about discussing it with people that are in learning, and I’ll just lay out maybe I’ll lay out some categories or or sectors as we as we’ve been calling them.
Jason Gorman (06:57)
Mm-hmm.
Right.
Yeah. Yeah.
James Altman (07:19)
in in learning. K 12 is obvious, right? Like in kindergarten through twelfth grade, you are learning, you’re in school. Generally almost everybody you interact with as a student there, right, could could easily be called a learning professional from a teacher to an administrator. and then higher ed, right? That’s like just the continuation. But then after that, in many cases, not all cases, you kind of end up in corporate learning and that’s called L and D or Learning and Development has
for some reason captured that title even though it could learning and development words could apply to anything. And then there’s corporate, sorry, then there’s workforce develop, which corporate is also part of the workforce, but it means this whole other set of thing and has all these other people that do all these various jobs. So I’ve I’ve been talking to all those people and what’s really interesting, it’s actually a minority, this is anecdotal, this is not kind of quantitative survey data, but anecdotally
Jason Gorman (07:56)
Yeah. Yeah.
James Altman (08:15)
When I talk to people and say, I’m surveying learning professionals and I’m trying to think about the future of learning professionals, there’s a small portion that says, What what? Who what what’s a learning professional? What do you what do you mean by that? Are and my I kind of kind of understand that you are one, you’re running a learning experience design company, so I get that, but like, do you mean instructional designer? and before I kind of continue that conversation, the majority say
Jason Gorman (08:25)
Ha ha ha.
James Altman (08:42)
Just start using learning professional in in their responses to me. They go, Well, when I think about kind of what learning professionals might need to do, you know, I think about these kind of workflows and and how you know how AI will be impacting that and how judgment will, you know, really impact our kind of out our our understanding of the output of AI. And it’s it’s just natural. I do wanna recognize not just is it not a it’s not only anecdotal, it is my network, right? So
I’m already self-selecting and talking to a certain amount, a certain slice of people. So I think the debate is fascinating and worthwhile having. Here’s maybe my or our opinion or around it from what you and I have discussed. Is when I name K 12 teacher, right? You think of this role. Corporate L and D, like
Course instructional designer, higher ed, like maybe learning strategists, right? Like there are all these different roles and titles. We we have I’m I’m gonna I love making numbers up, right? We have 87% of our jobs are in common. Like we are thinking about what the learner needs, we’re thinking about the learner’s goals, we’re thinking about the opportunities that come to the learner based on what they might learn.
Jason Gorman (09:51)
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (10:01)
How they will use the information, their own kind of metacognitive processes. And probably the biggest distinction is worth making is child child development and all the things that they will go through. Because a three year old is very, very different than a nine year old, very, very different than a 16 year old. So that’s a big category. But if you take adult learning across the globe, there’s more in common than not in terms of what.
People that are involved in that. So I like to say from a learning professional standpoint, definition of that title: are you involved or help in the creation of learning experiences? And from that perspective, it’s very broad, but it has a common goal, it’s a common outcome. Are you working on creating some form of learning for other adults, other people, other adults? and once you have that.
Jason Gorman (10:35)
Mm.
James Altman (10:53)
Like I said, I think you have eighty-seven percent overlap, just completely making completely making up numbers, but that there’s a lot in common. So I I I recently gathered, this is not a survey thing, but I’ll just tell a side story. I recently gathered 14, including myself, so 13 other relatively senior learning professionals, but they were across K twelve, corporate, workforce, association management, all
All the places that where most kind of most learning professionals end up landing in terms of sectors. and and and they’re all in New York. It was a physical gathering, but they they all pretty much agreed like we have a lot more in common than we don’t. And this is from the CLO of a major, I don’t even know, Fortune five hundred company, a big big company, down to someone that’s doing teacher training, you know, kind of class by class.
Jason Gorman (11:31)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (11:45)
in NYC public schools for the Department of Ed or for a nonprofit that helps with the Department of Ed. So a fascinating array. but but generally they agreed. A, they agreed on this kind of idea that learning professionals is a valid title and B that there’s a lot more in common than there than there isn’t. I said I would go back a little bit to the survey, like things I would like to improve in the survey. I’m just gonna say one thing because you mentioned it very particularly which is that we had
Early career professionals and late, middle and late. And one of the problems with the survey was that we asked for entry level.
professional, mid-career professional, senior career professional. ⁓ and I think the realization was that people really don’t like to be called entry level. in some cases we kind of saw in the data based on the kind of following of the responses that somebody had almost no kind of professional work experience, like basically had graduated, just graduated college, had some internships and stuff, but still didn’t call themselves entry level. So
Jason Gorman (12:23)
Mm.
Yeah.
James Altman (12:46)
I think using those kinds of labels where they might have connotations is dangerous and not a good not dangerous, but it’s not the right way to do this survey. And I think we could have asked how long have you how many years have you considered yourself a learning professional? Maybe something like that could have given us a little bit more of a quantitative response. Because then we would have gotten probably a lot more representation in what I was thinking of as an entry level professional. But we’ll make the next survey better.
Jason Gorman (12:59)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, we had it. We had to do a first one. This was a good first one. We get a lot of really interesting information out of it, some fascinating insights. ⁓ and maybe it would be good to get into what we found. I mean, I’m really curious about the three tiers ⁓ in the responses that emerged. you know, less I don’t know that we need to talk about, you know, all nine items that were on the survey, but more of
James Altman (13:19)
Chance of
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (13:40)
What jumped out are that the, I mean, at the kind of the bottom tier, are all of the things that I think four years ago, five years ago might have sat at the top. The things that we’ve really built our professional identities around in some in some cases. And then at the top tier, there’s an interesting mix of things. So I
I don’t know how did we land on the tiers that we landed on and what surprised you?
James Altman (14:10)
Yeah, well I mean it was surprising that there were three tiers ’cause it was nine individual items. Nobody was asking anybody to put them into three tiers. We said rate each one on its own on a scale of one to five, in terms of how important you think it will be for your career, your your specific job three years from now, within the next three years. And and s and statistically they came out as three tiers. Like ⁓ so that that’s
Jason Gorman (14:35)
Mm.
James Altman (14:37)
what’s really interesting. So I I will read some of them because I think it is may maybe we will get to all nine quickly in some way. But the top tier was learning strategy and design thinking. combined with and I’m gonna read them in a particular order, even though it’s slightly out of it in terms of its numeric division, but learning strategy and design thinking. So there’s a c a lot many of these are are are not hybrid but like c combinations of skills and they were intent
Jason Gorman (14:39)
Yes.
Maybe we will. Yeah.
James Altman (15:03)
intentionally written, A, to not have that very long list that we talked about earlier, but B to ensure that they kind of represented themselves appropriately as either durable skills, technical skills, and then there’s one exception, which I’ll get to. So why durable and technical? there was a bit of a hypothesis about the way that AI skill AI tools are transforming our work that we he that
The the the refrain that we hear in my version of it is the CFO jumping up and down saying, if we don’t get our entire team to learn AI skills, we’re gonna be disadvantaged, we’re gonna be behind, we’re gonna lose money. And the quick interpretation on that is let’s get technical professional development in here as fast as possible. I mean, you and I have heard it, we’ve been asked for it, right? Like that’s
Jason Gorman (15:53)
Mm-hmm. Hmm.
James Altman (15:57)
With it’s evident. and as you and I have worked with AI so much and and been trying to figure it out and how it applies, I think we’ve been like, well, geez, there’s a lot of judgment going on in terms of how do I use this output appropriately? How do I shape this content? How do I get the tool to do it the right way? And is that actually not quite a technical skill? Is that something that will last? Because it’s actually this almost human to human thing.
So the that one of the hypothesis hypotheses, or maybe I should just frame it as a question, research question, was how important are durable skills in this age of AI as it relates to technical skills? So the top skill was what I said, learning strategy and design thinking. And and by combining those, it it’s a broader set of skills, but it was rated the highest. The mean rating was four point four eight out of five, so high.
Not the next one, but within the top tier with stakeholder influence and strategic communication. I’m putting those two together in the top tier. the mean on that one was four point three nine because they’re just such clearly deep, durable skills, right? Like we want I want my eleven year old to understand design thinking and learning strategy for her work as much as I as much as I want a f a sixty five year old senior professional to be able to use those skills. Like they are just
Jason Gorman (17:02)
Mm-hmm.
Sure.
James Altman (17:16)
They’ve lasted since the beginning of our civilization, or whatever we want to call it, right? Till now. They’re durable, they’re persistent. the third one in the top tier, because out of nine, if there’s three tiers, there’s three in each tier, was AI tools and automation. And tools is a key term in that, because if you said kind of AI skills, as I was just referring to, a little too open to interpretation, but tools makes it technical.
Jason Gorman (17:42)
Hm,
James Altman (17:43)
⁓ you have
Jason Gorman (17:43)
mm.
James Altman (17:44)
to think about it as a as the tools that you’re using and which tool, which model am I using and am I getting the prompt right? And you you automatically just kind of think about that more as a technical skill. By the way, none of these were labeled technical or durable. So nobody was thinking about that. We weren’t prompting them, but we made the survey so there was that data to analyze after the fact. So just to because I said them out of order
Jason Gorman (18:00)
Okay.
James Altman (18:09)
It’s important to note that learning strategy design thinking, AI tools and automation, and strategic influence and strategic communication were stick statistically all in one tier. There was no way to separate them based on the data. We ran many different analyses. And even though AI tools was a little bit higher than strategic communication and a little bit lower than design thinking. So that’s the top tier, which I think is interesting. Two durable skills.
Jason Gorman (18:31)
So
James Altman (18:35)
And AI is in there, but from a from a from a a tighter perspective.
Jason Gorman (18:35)
Yeah.
From your thinking and the conversations that you’ve had with the other folks that you mentioned a minute ago, are there any thoughts about why those things rose to the top?
James Altman (18:51)
Well, there’s a lot of there’s a lot more there’s a lot more questions from this survey, right, than than answers. So I think one there’s probably two things I should say, and I’ll try to keep these tight so we can maybe talk about some of the other tiers, but one is we did actually have more senior people. Although we did kind of reach out and try to push and target and
Jason Gorman (18:55)
Hm.
James Altman (19:12)
We emailed everything from graduate programs to individual LinkedIn messages to people asking them to fill it out. So, ⁓ but we we definitely found the people that filled it out. Maybe they had more time on their hands, who knows? But senior, more senior people filled it out. More than half of the people identif identified themselves as senior. So as a senior professional, do you have more of a perspective that durable skills last longer? You’ve been doing your work.
Jason Gorman (19:18)
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (19:40)
longer and you’ve seen tools come and go and you’re thinking, I’m gonna put myself in a senior professional mindset. Am I thinking, well, I’m 50, I’ve been in this profession 25 years, three more years, like I know I need to learn AI, so that’s up there. But like I I probably am gonna do really well with big picture stuff like learning strategy and design thinking.
and stakeholder influence and strategic communication, making sure I can express my ideas clearly, which are being put to the test right now on this podcast, whether I can express my ideas clearly, but but I I understand that it’s important, so I would rank them high, right? ⁓ so why are they there? I’m gonna then just jump to an answer to a question that you didn’t ask, which is well why might there be durable skills down down low? Right? There was one.
Jason Gorman (20:13)
Yeah.
Yeah. Mm-hmm.
Yeah, sure.
James Altman (20:33)
And it’s facilitation and delivery specifically, because there was actually a couple other durable skills, but at the one almost near the bottom is facilitation and delivery. And I don’t know. Right? I it’s really interesting.
Jason Gorman (20:45)
What what
can you remind me what how exactly was the question phrased? Which of these skills will be most important in the next three years? What was the phrase?
James Altman (20:51)
It was individual.
It’s important to it’s I’m glad you’re asking because it’s important to restate that. Every they were asked to rate each individual skill on a scale from zero to five on how important they think it will be to them. So the mean for facilitation and delivery is three point six six. So not not unimportant, right? A little bit more important than not. In fact, all these skills got above three point five. So they kind of thought all of these were useful.
Jason Gorman (21:00)
Each individual scale. Yeah.
James Altman (21:20)
But the bottom tier was mostly technical. So two technical skills. You mentioned this at the beginning, things that I’ve built literally built my career on in in a very concrete way. Learning technology, parentheses, LMS authoring tools, and content development. It’s been huge. Both well bottom tier. And both of those are in there with facilitation and delivery. I mean those
Jason Gorman (21:21)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
At the bottom, bottom tier. Mm-hmm.
And just to be clear,
this is not like people saying that these things don’t matter. They’re saying that that
in terms of the importance that it might matter to them or to, I guess, our profession that they’re slightly lower than these other ones.
James Altman (22:03)
Yeah, so I think I named the top ones had means of like four point four eight, right? Or four point four six. These ones had means of three point seven and three point six. So it’s it’s a full point difference, right? Statistically significant, but three out of five is still important, right? So and you know, as a side note, you could have marked all all of them five. I think literally nobody did that. So people
Jason Gorman (22:10)
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (22:30)
did rate them differently, like in terms of the data analysis, the the data was telling there was clear patterns in terms of where people thought these were important. I am gonna throw you a curveball though. Around 133 responsive, we actually ran a partial analysis. And I’m saying that because we had it intended to get 120 and it kind of kept going and we kind of wanted to understand where we were. I’m not enough of a
Jason Gorman (22:40)
Do it.
James Altman (22:59)
data scientist to say whether that is a valid way of dealing with this. But I’m gonna tell you something that’s interesting. There were not three tiers at that time. Learning strategy and design thinking in that sample set, which was a random sample set in the in the fact that it was not not the complete, the survey did not end and be analyzed on its whole, learning strategy and design thinking was the clear number one at that time.
So it remained in the top number one and statistic and and sorry, numerically the mean is still higher than all of the other skills. So it did did stay that way, but whatever you call the difference, statistical significance, was not big enough to separate that tier. ⁓ in end with 197. So it was interesting, right? Like you can’t use that data. but because it’s not the complete set, but it was it was an interesting curveball.
Jason Gorman (23:34)
Hm.
Mm.
James Altman (23:54)
that that was at that time when I did that initial wave, kind of the single clear winner out of all nine.
Jason Gorman (24:01)
Interesting. and what
So say it again, it was it’s design thinking and strategy.
James Altman (24:08)
Yeah, learning strategy specifically, learning strategy and design thinking. That’s one skill. so won’t the best way to say it, and in fact, writing the report had its own challenges because each one of these skills is compound. I said hybrid or earlier, but I kind of has this compound element. A lot of them has and facilitation and delivery. It’s a skill item. That’s probably the best way to talk about it. It’s a skill item, right? They’re rating the item, which is a set of skills. So it’s like the the item that they rated
Jason Gorman (24:10)
Learning strategy.
James Altman (24:37)
said learning strategy and design thinking all in one phrase.
Jason Gorman (24:43)
Another thing that came out in the report beyond the tiers, there were a couple things that I found particularly interesting. I think in the report you refer to them as gaps, kind of interesting gaps. so I’m gonna talk about those. I’m also gonna add a little bit of my commentary before I give you a question. So the first one was on storytelling and narrative design. This is one of the items. And this one was interesting because people
James Altman (25:00)
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (25:11)
Rated it a full point higher themselves. So they personally felt that storytelling and narrative design was very important. But when they rated what they thought their how important their employers thought storytelling and narrative design one is, it was a full point lower. That’s a lot. That’s an enormous gap. And then in the second gap that I think is interesting is that it was data analysis and reporting, and it was the opposite.
They felt like their employers felt like data analysis and reporting was more a more critical skill for their work than they did. Not by a full point, but there was still a gap, kind of in that other opposite direction. And so these kind of feel connected to me. you can tell me if I’m reaching, although I I don’t think we have any perfect conclusions here, but it does feel like there’s a little bit of a link. I think.
James Altman (25:52)
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (26:04)
That people who do the work that we do feel that storytelling does matter. It impacts the quality of our deliverables. It also impacts how memorable what what we know the learning is and how useful it is. Storytelling is so so useful from that perspective. but maybe they don’t feel like their organizations value it because it’s it’s really hard to measure.
How do you measure the efficacy of a story as opposed to, you know, something that is not story-driven? and then you know, it’s kind of the opposite with data and reporting, right? Very easy to measure, something that is certainly usually in many organizations demanded by senior leadership. and so it’s interesting that in the self-reporting about where people
James Altman (26:35)
Yep, exact. Right.
Jason Gorman (26:55)
ranked these things and where their organizations rank them, it almost felt like a little bit of a critique about their organizations, right? Like our organization maybe is not valuing things in the right way, right? That there is a mismatch in how we think about what is valuable in this work. you know what gets valued is what’s easy to measure. I think this is a it’s we see this again and again. So I don’t know. I
am I on to something here? Is there a is there something else that you f feel or think about this or that that other people you’ve talked to have had to say about either of these things or both?
James Altman (27:35)
Yeah, you mean you’ve nailed a a couple of them. I’m gonna use the fourteen people, th I keep saying fourteen, me included, so thirteen other senior learning professionals and there there was a very quick and easy consensus that especially from corporate L and D but even workforce development that if data and reporting was ranked a bit higher by the learning professionals that filled out their survey in terms of their perception of how their employers would rate it. So I just wanna make sure everyone gets the the kind of meta thing, right? We’re asking
learning professionals not only to rank these skills on zero to five on how important they think they’ll be, but then take those exact nine skills and s and ask them to to rate what they think their employer would rate them, basically. Would their employer rate them as high? And this is where they said their from their perspective, the employers would rate data analysis and reporting as as higher. And then in in stark contrast, storytelling and narrative design was rated higher by the learning.
Jason Gorman (28:17)
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (28:31)
professionals and not rated by the employers. And yeah, I mean, I I definitely connect them. there was no follow-up in this that connected them. And I’m I’ll even I’m even gonna just tell you pull back the curtain, which is I think the whole point of this this episode, is when we did a lot of analysis to come up with these nine skills and look at a lot of competency frameworks and and job descriptions that relate to learning professionals in general.
All the other ones show up, but storytelling and narrative design doesn’t show up very often. So so why is it in our nine? it’s in our nine because we co-founded a company that uses storytelling as a as a as a principle and as a framework for strategic communications. and we we believe in it, right? We we understand that this is an ancient form, that it’s literally in our DNA in terms of the way that our brains can can almost do a form of telepathy.
Jason Gorman (29:01)
Hmm.
James Altman (29:26)
by by transferring emotion from one person to another using story. So it’s in there because we wanted it to be in there. That’s like the only reason. ⁓ and we wanted to get some data on it. it’s probably obviously a durable skill. I just want to mention that as well, right? Story story time is something that you can learn the techniques of, but we’re we’re very much especially when you add it to narrative design, very much thinking of it as a durable skill that will last regardless of the technologies that you use.
Jason Gorman (29:30)
Yeah.
⁓ huh. Sure.
James Altman (29:53)
And then I just also want to say this data analysis and reporting, people may be thinking of that if they’re already thinking of these kind of diametric, durable, and technical skills. Data analysis and reporting may jump out as a technical skill, but if you start thinking about it, data analysis itself has a lot of things that are really critical judgmental skills, right? What what do you see in the data? It’s not it’s not necessarily Excel skills or status skills or mathematica.
It’s it’s thinking about what matters and how you get it out. So that’s actually the only one that we call a bridge or combined. It’s going back and forth between the two. and yeah, I think you nailed it from the employer’s perspective, ROI. What’s the I? If I’m gonna make an investment on something, right, I need to see what that is. Businesses have to have that. It’s like a fundamental element.
Jason Gorman (30:27)
Hmm, hmm.
James Altman (30:45)
And storytelling is extremely hard to measure. I started joking around with this group. Could there be like a dashboard of the number of times you get goosebumps from a learning experience? Right? Because like you’re probably gonna get goosebumps, it’s I would easily say from a storytelling tool, right? Some unbelievably kind of crazy story that just gets you on the edge of your seat and gives you goosebumps. And if you had
Jason Gorman (31:01)
Yeah.
James Altman (31:13)
Goosebumps occurring in learning experiences as a metric, it’s this wonderful way to connect ROI, right? We’re now measuring something which is the efficacy of storytelling for engagement, right? ‘Cause you’re you’re transmitting these emotions via a learning experience. So that kind of stuff is fun to be able to think about. But it certainly makes a good amount of sense that learning professionals are very much interested in the goosebumps, right? they live for those, probably many of us. I I do.
And the report is the employers, bread and butter. So it’s it’s kind of not crazy, but it’s also important to think about and then yeah, brainstorm these ways to make make those two work together is also really, really interesting. I mean, you and I talk about this stuff all the time, but AI may now provide us ways to measure storytelling in ways that we never have thought about. Right? Like does the measure the
Jason Gorman (32:05)
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (32:08)
The efficacy of the storytelling in the course, like we might be able to assess that, create new models of understanding through through LLMs that that we didn’t have before, especially at scale. So it’s yeah, really, really kind of interesting. by the way, we did talk about the bottom tier. These two that we’re talking about right now are the middle tier. So it’s also kind of interesting that the ones that had the biggest differential between employers and learning professionals were in them.
Jason Gorman (32:31)
Hmm. Hmm.
James Altman (32:38)
middle tier. The top one in the middle tier, because that they were all very close in numbers in their ranking, was change management and organizational development. So yet another durable skill. So out of the top six, four were durable. Yeah. Kind of a
Jason Gorman (32:38)
In the middle.
Change management. Interesting. Well, we have
talked a little bit about AI, but we should talk a little bit more about AI. ⁓ In the survey, 44% of the people named something AI related as the single most important competency for the next three years. So on the surface, 44% is kind of the headline, but in the report, you pointed out that that number.
James Altman (32:55)
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (33:19)
is an umbrella. There’s a lot that goes underneath it that could be hidden in that big headline number. So what is being lumped together in that forty four percent of people who say that AI is the most important competency? What does that mean when you dig in?
James Altman (33:33)
Yeah, there is a couple of categories. and and a really wide range of self-reported experience with AI, which which you know would really color your ranking of those skills, right? I mean people are in some of the in some of the responses were were just saying, you know, I’m I’m building highly agentic workflows that are taking raw content from subject matter experts, doing initial analysis, matching it to learning objectives, finding the appropriate or creating the appropriate
Jason Gorman (33:53)
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (34:02)
kind of graphical assets for it, running processes that create the the AI voiceover and combining these assets and and creating creating new learning material almost all on the fly with its own level of judgment. So some people are doing that type of work. Some people were saying I am actively resisting all forms of AI and not and I’m not using it and I’m not gonna use it and you can’t make me use it. So that scale was present.
So inventioning AI, I mean, I’ll take a step back. We had a three open responses. we have yet to kind of truly expose all of that data because it was so rich. In some cases, entire job descriptions were being pasted in to make a point about either what they do or how they do it. people were probably also pasting in things that came out of AI and putting them into the survey. I think
Jason Gorman (34:30)
Yeah.
Hmm.
James Altman (34:58)
Just the amount of qualitative data that came out of this survey compared to if you had done it in 2022 would be fascinating because I think we’re all dealing with a lot of content. Some of it may be SLOP, some of it might not be, but like it it was a lot. People put a lot of stuff in there, probably because we’re all kind of doing that with a lot of data, a lot of words these days.
Jason Gorman (35:15)
Yeah.
James Altman (35:25)
Really interesting, really interesting. A another pattern, I I don’t have a number for it right here, right now, because it probably doesn’t merit some more analysis, but AI was mentioned a ton in those open responses. So was judgment. Like literally just the word judgment was came up many, many, many times. Really interesting on that, and how to preserve it or how to or how to get back to it or how to help your colleagues have it when they’re
When they’re dealing with something in the output. So judgment, really interesting to see that word highly kind of within the mix at a very high rate in mixed in with AI. And then another trend with the open responses, I’m just going with that flow for a minute, is that we asked about learning professionals’ ratings, and we asked about their understanding of their employers’ ratings, their perceptions of their employers’ ratings.
Jason Gorman (36:07)
Yeah.
James Altman (36:19)
And that appeared to be a trigger potentially about well, in this open response, kind of is there anything else that you’d like to tell us? People took a lot of opportunity to kind of draw what might be described as a general indictment of the learning profession. And what I mean is that people were saying, they’re actually saying what you said at the beginning of this episode. They were saying.
No there is no and there is no clear answer. I am getting extreme pressure from this side, whatever the side it is, to use the AI, to in some cases not use AI. Like not g some some organizations are still like locked out of the tools. And probably those organizations have like good reasons, but that is still impacting them. So and then there’s no map, there’s no guide, there’s no
Jason Gorman (37:01)
Yeah.
James Altman (37:12)
Like it is it does feel like chaos for people. And I don’t think learning profession is all that different than a lot of other digital jobs in that people probably feel that way. But man, did it come out in the qualitative responses, yeah.
Jason Gorman (37:21)
Mm-hmm.
It’s fast. Well, you know, the 44% of people who said that something AI related is the single most important competency in the next three years, that’s very mixed. I mean, it’s dominant as a single technology. But we all know that it has this outsized place in our thinking, in our work right now. It’s not even didn’t even get to 50%. I just think that is very, that in itself is actually quite interesting. I would have expected that.
James Altman (37:50)
Yes.
Jason Gorman (37:57)
something AI related as the single most important competency would have been a little higher. But I I think that tells a story. And what you just said is that there’s this incredible
loud disagreement about what it should be, let alone what it will be. And thankfully, I would hope that us as the humans, who should be the benef beneficiaries of anything AI related, should have a say in how it’s used. So that people are pushing back. All right, this is how, right, this is how we shape where these technologies have a place in our work and in society. So
I am fascinated by that. and just from a larger perspective, I would say in the last just weeks from students booing graduation speakers to you know, the government pulling the best model in the world off the market with an hour and a half notice to open AI’s.
Finance is being released and it looks like they’ve lost over $24 billion in a year. That’s billion with a B, by the way. Not million with an So there are a lot of questions about the future of these technologies, the sustainability of them, how much it’s going to cost us, whether people even want to use them. So we’re kind of, I think that this, when this survey happened, which was really towards the beginning of this year,
Clearly, there’s a lot of that boiling right under the surface that seemed to come up in the in the survey itself. ⁓
James Altman (39:34)
Yeah,
yeah, that’s a great point. I think there’s a s little bit of a section I we kind of called it like the season in which we gave the survey, ’cause the spring of twenty twenty six in terms of AI was unique in in terms of itself, right? There were like literally like vandalism acts happening to the leaders of AI’s housing. There were there was I mean if you looked up maybe something like AI Dent Data Center protests and you looked at that in 2025
Jason Gorman (39:55)
Right. Yeah.
James Altman (40:03)
You probably find some, but like in 2026 it’s a thing. It’s a it’s a major news story. It’s in local news and national news. And there are protests and legislation and petitions happening all over in 2026 because people are saying they’re using they’re making the energy more expensive, they’re saying they’re using the water, right? All of all of those things that it’s it’s important to think about the season in which a s a survey takes place and it was spring 2026
That was not insignificant in terms of what we were asking and when we were asking.
Jason Gorman (40:35)
Definitely. And actually one of the open text responses, every time I read it, it just feels like a gut punch. So you said there was one place where people could just write whatever they want. And somebody wrote, quote, I feel like I’m being set up to fail in in relation to AI, right? And so I don’t know when you read that, like, what do you picture? I
James Altman (40:55)
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (41:03)
What do you think that what do you think that it sounds like what you sensed was a lot of that? That one person said it outright, but there was this general sense of maybe this isn’t so good for us.
James Altman (41:16)
You know, it’s interesting. I’m not sure. That quote stands out. The qualitative analysis is hard, right? Like people might say both in their answer. So, right? They might say, This has transformed my ability to do stuff with learning experiences in a way that I’ve imagined for my whole life and is now finally possible, and I hate it. Like, and it’s like, what is that?
Jason Gorman (41:20)
Mm.
Hmm.
James Altman (41:45)
answer. What how do you possibly code that into a way that says like pro AI, anti AI, maybe so we we tried, we worked on a lot of ways to code various things, and a lot of it I think as you’re seeing from our the way we’re talking about the responses, ended up being like they mentioned it or not, you know, which is like the 44%. but but I don’t I so I don’t know to be honest. You’re saying like the indictment that I said is of it’s of our profession.
Which makes sense because of how you open this. There is no people have there’s great pundits right now, right? Like saying that because some people are like very pro this or pro that saying you must do this to be that that, you must do this to be that. Like there are lots of opinions you can find, but expertise in terms of the long term effects of this technology, we just don’t
Jason Gorman (42:21)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
James Altman (42:40)
don’t have them, right? if you asked, I said I’ve been saying this, you’ve heard me say it a few times, but like in 1995, I was in college, people were saying like, you, you, literally everyone, that was the you must learn HTML, right?
Jason Gorman (42:53)
Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah.
James Altman (42:59)
Sounded right at the time because everyone was saying it. And I did it. I I learned it. How much did I really use that? Did I become a did I become a web designer? No. I mean some I my daughter came home from school talking about STEM and learning some coding and and I don’t have any more citation than her STEM teacher, but her STEM teacher said two percent of the world is involved in computer coding.
Jason Gorman (43:03)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
James Altman (43:26)
Tiny number, right? Tiny tiny number. We think about it all the time, we interact with it all the time. And maybe the number’s growing, because I’m doing more coding or vibe coding to be more accurate, but it’s interesting to think about what how that relates to the skills that we will need, right? You’re saying everyone’s saying learn AI, but AI is hundreds of different skills. so how how can we possibly know exactly what that is? I’m gonna I’m gonna pull out a quote and maybe I’ll even say who this this is.
Jason Gorman (43:45)
Yes.
James Altman (43:54)
it was not from the survey, it’s actually from the follow-up that I did with the thirteen people. this amazing learning professional who has been involved in developing everything from technical high school programs to kind of statewide workforce development programs. His name’s Diallo. super intelligent, wonderful guy, and he said one of my pieces of advice for people that I work with is to say,
Try not to use AI for for something that you don’t know how to do, more or less, right? Like don’t jump off the cliff and do so and and ask for something. And then we kind of got into the discussion and we kind of refined it to like, in terms of like content, it’s probably a more accurate way of talking about it. And when we say that, we meant like if you’ve never written a strategic plan for a workforce development program, right? Or or a or a program for workforce development.
Jason Gorman (44:25)
Mm.
James Altman (44:47)
Maybe don’t ask it for one because you might not know if it’s good, right? ⁓ but if you’ve written an element of one or you have helped contribute a section of one, maybe do that part. And I think there’s a lot of logic to that. But the area we both kind of agreed was an area that people are doing things that they don’t have experience in and finding success, I said, was building some automation between systems that I work. I want Google Drive.
Jason Gorman (44:50)
Yeah.
James Altman (45:16)
When it has notes updated from a subject matter expert to put that in another place, maybe even move that content, and I’m writing app scripts that I never would have attempted. And why is that okay? And it’s because the result is binary, right? It it worked or it didn’t work, and that gives me a safe place to do things that I haven’t done. I think that’s one of the reasons vibe coding is so exciting. a lot of us
Jason Gorman (45:26)
Yeah.
Clear. Yeah. Yeah.
James Altman (45:43)
I spent a lot of time strategizing and when you get when you build something, especially between nine PM and eleven PM, ⁓ and you’re like, Wow, I built it and it works, it’s very satisfying. So, anyway, I was a lot of connecting a lot of dots there, trying to.
Jason Gorman (45:49)
Yeah.
Well, there’s so many to connect. So there’s one last thing that we have to get to. So the report ends by pointing at something we haven’t built yet, which is a skills roadmap for learning professionals. That was kind of the idea going into it. The survey is not the roadmap itself. It’s kind of a first round of questions to get us into that work.
James Altman (46:00)
wow.
Jason Gorman (46:20)
So maybe you could just say, what do you think the roadmap act actually will look like if we were to get it right? And and also want to just say, you can say it too, but I’m gonna, we can just reinforce each other. We want other people, anybody listening to this who’s interested in mapping out a skills roadmap for learning professionals, we would like to talk to you because this is something we know are going to take a lot of people to be thinking about and refining it as we go. But just what what is that? What
James Altman (46:33)
Yes.
Yeah.
Jason Gorman (46:48)
Will that roadmap do once it’s
James Altman (46:51)
You know, it’s kind of inter it’s kind of interesting because if you think about everything we said, which one of the themes of this whole podcast and I think the report of this episode of the podcast is no one no one has the answer. So w so I don’t wanna pretend if you’re gonna write a roadmap, you kind of have to pretend you have the answer. So I I actually kind of think about it as a roadmap to the roadmap now is like, if the roadmap that we’re talking about, which is like, hey, these are probably the skills
Jason Gorman (47:07)
Right.
huh.
James Altman (47:19)
That we need to work on. And I don’t think we have that answer. We have we have p what people think, it’s what learning professionals think in spring of 2026 right, that they think are highly rated. It it’s probably gonna change. I think one of the questions that got answered was durable skills matter a lot. That’s probably something that’s just worth being repeated these days. Durable skills matter a lot, and it and no I don’t think there’s CFOs jumping up and down saying, where is our durable skills training?
but maybe maybe there maybe they should be or there should be a version of it, right? and I’m sure there is a mix. I don’t wanna I also don’t wanna not painting all CFOs the same. They’re not, they’re people, but the the the ROI question that we talked about is is critical. So what so what is it if if we think about this roadmap to a roadmap is how do we keep how do we keep our learning profession engaged and catalyzed?
Jason Gorman (47:52)
Maybe they should. Yeah.
James Altman (48:16)
How do we convene them globally, locally, regionally, and I I think, and I think you agree, break these sectors in ways that matter. My personal vision is that for all the time that I spent in all of these sectors, K-12, higher ed, workforce development, associations, my next project, my next client will benefit from that experience. And I think benefit more, and maybe not magnitudes, but benefit more.
Than someone that may have only ever been a learning professional in higher ed. For what I am doing, for the way that I am strategizing, responding, and bringing together lots of information, evidence, and standards, as we always talk about, around what would impact the learning experience. Years in K 12 matter, years in teacher training matter, years in higher ed matter, but now a lot of corporate learning, a lot of association development, workforce development, those things
That I have learned about non-traditional learners, newly immigrated learners, like those are things you might not have found in a lot of higher ed, for example, and they they those those experiences matter in being able to think about how to serve learners and get them the best learning experience to get them the best opportunities in their in their life. So if we break these sectors down, we keep learning profession engaged, we do better surveys, maybe we’ll get closer.
Jason Gorman (49:36)
Mm-hmm.
James Altman (49:41)
To a roadmap and the roadmap’s going to evolve. But maybe there is something like a cross-sector set of durable and technical skills that we we could all use as a basis. Maybe that’s one way to think about it. But Jason said, if you are interested in any of this stuff that we are blathering on about, like just send us james at jackrabbitlx.com, jason at jackrabbitlx.com. Just we’re we’re a little excited.
Jason Gorman (49:44)
Yeah.
That’s great.
Hmm.
James Altman (50:09)
about it and about what’s possible and we’d love to we’d love to be excited with you to talk about it. So definitely wanna underscore that opportunity. Connect.
Jason Gorman (50:09)
Ha ha ha
Awesome. Yeah, let’s have the conversation. I
really appreciate you coming on, talking about this awesome work that you’ve done, what we’ve learned from it, where we’re going next. Thank you, James, for doing this. All right. Bye.
James Altman (50:28)
Thank you. Rock and roll. See you soon.