Leadership development is widely recognized as a business capability, but organizations differ substantially in how they build it. Recent LinkedIn and CIPD research measures leadership training, career-development practices, delivery methods, manager support, learning impact, and expected changes in workplace skills.
Contents
- Leadership priorities and readiness
- Program adoption and development practices
- Delivery methods and organizational size
- Manager support and learning culture
- Measurement and organizational impact
- Budgets, technology, and future delivery
Leadership priorities and readiness
The Workplace Learning Report 2025 describes a capability gap that puts leadership development in a strategic context. In LinkedIn’s 2025 survey, 49% of learning and talent-development professionals said executives were concerned that employees lacked the skills needed to execute business strategy. The result is a leadership question as well as a training question: people need opportunities to develop, and organizations need systems that connect development with changing priorities.
LinkedIn classified organizations by the maturity of their career-development efforts. In the 2025 report, 36% qualified as career-development champions, meaning they had robust programs producing business results. Another 31% had programs with limited adoption, while 33% had no career-development initiatives or were just getting started. These categories describe the maturity of career development, not a universal ranking of leadership quality, but they show how uneven organizational readiness can be.
The mature group also differed in its approach to emerging technology. Career-development champions were 42% more likely than all other organizations to be frontrunners in generative-AI adoption. Using aggregated platform and survey data through September 2024, LinkedIn reported that 51% of champions were at the accelerating or leading stages of generative-AI adoption, compared with 36% of organizations with weaker career-development programs. Champions deployed at least 33% more career-development tactics than non-champions, and 83% planned to maintain or increase investment in career-driven learning during the report year.
The priority itself was also rising. In LinkedIn’s Workplace Learning Report 2024, helping employees develop their careers moved from ninth to fourth place on the L&D priority list in one year. That year-over-year change connects leadership development with broader career mobility, rather than treating it as a narrow course category.
Program adoption and development practices
Leadership training was the most common quantified leadership-specific practice in the 2025 LinkedIn figures: 71% of organizations offered it. Other practices created supporting pathways into leadership and internal growth. Internal job openings were shared by 59% of organizations, while 55% offered career-development plans and another 55% offered mentorship programs. Recognition and reward programs appeared in 50% of organizations.
Several practices were used by fewer than half of organizations. Cross-functional projects were used by 45%, internal-mobility programs by 44%, and the remaining organizations in each case did not report that practice in the cited measure. These figures do not show that one method is universally better than another. They show that leadership development commonly combines formal training with work assignments, mentoring, visibility into opportunities, and movement across roles.
LinkedIn’s 2024 report offers a second view by focusing on mature career-development organizations. Among that group, 70% offered leadership-development programs, 58% shared internal job postings, 57% offered mentorship programs, 49% offered individual career plans, and 44% offered internal mobility. Online learning programs were available in 68% of mature organizations.
The two reports use different classifications and reporting periods, so their percentages should not be treated as a direct trend line. Together, however, they show a consistent pattern: leadership development is more substantial when it is connected to the employee’s next role, a mentor or sponsor, and visible opportunities to apply new capability.
| Development practice | LinkedIn 2025: all reported organizations | LinkedIn 2024: mature organizations |
|---|---|---|
| Leadership development or training | 71% | 70% |
| Internal job postings or openings | 59% | 58% |
| Mentorship | 55% | 57% |
| Career plans | 55% career-development plans | 49% individual career plans |
| Internal mobility | 44% | 44% |
Source: Workplace Learning Report 2025 and Workplace Learning Report 2024. The groups and measures differ between reports.
Delivery methods and organizational size
The CIPD Learning at work 2023: Survey report measured methods that respondents said their organizations had facilitated or funded during the prior two years. In-house development programs and mentoring each reached 42% of respondents. Formal qualifications or accredited programs were also used by 42%. Self-directed learning reached 41%, while external conferences, workshops, and events reached 40%. Coaching and collaboration with peers each reached 36%.
The survey also showed different access patterns by organizational size. Apprenticeships were used by 46% of large organizations compared with 20% of SMEs. In-house development programs reached 51% of large organizations and 30% of SMEs. Blended learning was used by 37% of large organizations, compared with 16% of SMEs.
These figures are measures of reported use during the preceding two years, not estimates of the quality or effectiveness of each method. They do indicate that scale can influence the range of leadership-development formats an organization can fund or coordinate. A larger employer may have more capacity for formal pathways, while a smaller organization may rely more heavily on direct coaching, peer collaboration, or targeted external learning.
Manager support and learning culture
Leadership development transfers into daily work only when managers make room for it. In the CIPD 2023 survey, 51% of respondents said managers encouraged participation in learning and development. Only 39% believed employees were given time away from day-to-day work for learning and development. The difference suggests that verbal encouragement and protected time are separate parts of the development experience.
Manager involvement in the design of learning was also limited. Thirty-seven percent said managers were involved in defining learning and development needs, and 37% said individuals influenced decisions about their own learning and development. Forty-six percent said managers were open to discussing performance needs with learning professionals. Only 27% felt individuals had clear goals for engaging with learning and development opportunities.
The wider learning culture included some stronger signals. Sixty-three percent said L&D practitioners worked with other functions to deliver business-critical priorities. Fifty-three percent said their organizations challenged individuals in their work and encouraged innovative job performance. Forty-two percent said employees had greater autonomy and control over decisions about how they worked.
Taken together, the results point to a practical leadership-development requirement: programs need a link to real performance conversations, clear goals, and enough autonomy for participants to practice new behaviors. A course alone cannot establish those conditions.
Measurement and organizational impact
Measurement practices were developing, but they were not universal. In the CIPD 2023 survey, 57% of respondents said L&D was proactive in identifying a performance issue before recommending a solution, up from 32% in the 2021 survey. However, only 55% had a process for using feedback to continually improve L&D interventions, and only 50% had a process for assessing learning impact.
The survey found a strong relationship between feeling valued by leaders and evidence-informed L&D practices. Among respondents who felt valued by leaders, 70% said they designed recommendations using evidence-informed principles, compared with 41% among those who did not feel valued. Sixty-three percent of the valued group reported processes for assessing impact, compared with 33% among those not feeling valued. Seventy-three percent of respondents who felt valued said they were proactive in identifying performance issues, compared with 34% among those not feeling valued.
These are survey comparisons, not proof that one factor directly causes the other. They do show that leadership behavior and learning measurement appear together in the reported data. Organizations that value the people responsible for learning may be more likely to give them the influence and information needed to diagnose problems and assess results.
LinkedIn’s 2024 platform analysis also connected learning culture with workforce outcomes. Organizations with strong learning cultures had a 7% higher management-promotion rate than organizations with less robust learning cultures. They had 23% higher internal mobility and a 57% higher retention rate. The analysis reports relative differences between groups; it does not provide a universal guarantee that a particular leadership program will produce those outcomes.
Budgets, technology, and future delivery
Leadership development is being planned against an uncertain skills environment. The workforce evidence cited in the CIPD 2023 report forecast that 44% of workers’ current skills would be disrupted within five years. This is a forecast cited in a 2023 report, not a completed measurement of disruption.
Delivery expectations were also shifting. Thirty-eight percent of CIPD 2023 respondents expected digital or online learning use to increase during the next 12 months. Twenty-nine percent expected investment in learning technology to increase, while 10% expected that investment to decrease. The forecast period is the 12 months following the 2023 survey.
The balance between formats had already changed. The share of organizations where face-to-face delivery supplied most learning fell from 44% in 2020 to 25% in the CIPD 2023 survey. In 2023, 25% of organizations delivered learning entirely online or through digital methods. Blended learning accounted for less than 20% of learning in half of organizations, showing that digital growth did not mean every organization had already adopted a highly blended model.
Resource visibility was another constraint. Twenty-one percent of respondents with learning-leadership responsibilities did not have insight into the available learning budget. The most common annual L&D budget reported in the CIPD 2023 survey was £151–£400 per employee. Budget pressure was particularly visible in the public sector: 50% of public-sector respondents reported limited budget as an L&D barrier.
For leadership and global-exchange organizations, these statistics frame development as a system of choices: who receives opportunities, how learning is delivered, whether managers protect time, and whether the organization can connect investment with measurable outcomes. The figures do not prescribe one format or budget. They show the operational conditions that shape whether leadership development becomes an isolated event or an ongoing route into stronger capability and mobility.