What the 2025 Workplace Learning Report Means for Canadian SMBs

• 91% of L&D professionals agree that continuous learning is more important than ever for career success (LinkedIn Learning, 2025)
• 88% of organisations are concerned about employee retention, and learning opportunities are survey respondents' number one retention strategy (LinkedIn Learning, 2025)
• Only 15% of employees say their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months — a five percentage point decline from 2024 (LinkedIn Learning, 2025)

The headline the report buries

LinkedIn's 2025 Workplace Learning Report leads with a celebratory finding: organisations that prioritise career development outperform their peers on profitability, retention, and AI adoption. That part is true and worth reading. But the more useful headline for someone responsible for training at a Canadian small or mid-sized business is the finding sitting quietly in Chapter 3 — that managers, employees, and talent teams are all stretched too thin to make career development happen at all. Half of survey respondents (50%) said managers lack the support they need to drive employee career growth.

That number is the story. The report frames it as a constraint on best-in-class organisations. For a 100-person Canadian company without a dedicated L&D function, it describes the entire operating reality.

The skills crisis, translated

Forty-nine percent of L&D professionals surveyed agreed with the statement, "My executives are concerned that employees do not have the right skills to execute our business strategy." LinkedIn calls this the skills crisis, and the data behind it is striking. The platform's analysis of skill flows in and out of companies identified the ten skills most likely to drain away through employee turnover. The list reads like a description of a leadership team:

1. Business strategy
2. Strategic planning
3. Sales management
4. Project planning
5. Operations management
6. Marketing strategy
7. Management
8. Business development
9. Negotiation
10. Team leadership

These are not technical skills that a course can hand back to you. They are judgment skills built through years of context, relationships, and decisions made under uncertainty. When someone with these capabilities leaves a 1,000-person company, there is usually someone else in the building who can absorb the gap. When the same person leaves a 60-person company, the gap is the company.

This is the part of the report that should make Canadian SMBs uncomfortable. The skills most at risk of being lost to attrition are exactly the skills your business cannot operate without. And the smaller the organisation, the more concentrated those skills are in a handful of people.

Retention is the survival problem

Eighty-eight percent of organisations told LinkedIn they are concerned about employee retention. When asked which retention strategy they are betting on, the number one answer was learning opportunities. That order matters. Compensation, flexibility, and benefits are all on the list — learning came first.

This finding lines up with what other research has been saying for years. Gallup's research on employee engagement consistently shows that opportunity to learn and grow is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone stays. Statistics Canada labour data shows quit rates at Canadian employers remain elevated compared to pre-2020 baselines, particularly in services and skilled trades.

For an SMB, the implication is uncomfortable. The standard advice — "compete on culture, not compensation" — only works if culture includes a credible answer to the question, "What can I learn here that I cannot learn somewhere else?" If the answer is nothing, your retention strategy is just hoping no one calls your best people.

The manager support collapse

The most under-reported finding in the entire report is buried in Chapter 3. LinkedIn asked employees what kinds of learning and career support their manager actually provided in the past six months. Every single category dropped year over year:

• Encouraged me to spend time learning — down 6%
• Challenged me to learn new skills — down 5%
• Recommended learning materials — down 7%
• Helped me build a career development plan — down 5%

Only 15% of employees said their manager helped them build a career plan. Less than one in six. At an enterprise with a structured talent function, this is a problem that other systems can partially compensate for — formal career frameworks, dedicated career conversations in the performance cycle, internal job boards. At an SMB, the manager is the system. If managers are not having career conversations, no one is. If managers are not encouraging learning, no one is.

And managers in this survey are not refusing to do this work — they are out of capacity. The same chapter notes that 50% of respondents cited a lack of manager support as a top three barrier to career development. The collapse is not about willingness; it is about time and skill.

Our view, from working with Canadian SMBs

"The manager support drop is the finding most within a small or mid-sized employer's control to fix — and the one most worth your attention. Managers want to have these conversations. What they almost never have is a single, repeatable tool simple enough to use in a 20-minute one-on-one. Build that tool, give it to every manager, and most of the gap closes within two quarters."

AI in L&D — what it actually means for a 60-person company

The report devotes significant attention to generative AI. Seventy-one percent of L&D professionals say they are exploring, experimenting with, or integrating AI into their work, and the report's case studies include large enterprises using AI to suggest internal roles to employees, run sales coaching simulations, and personalise learning paths at scale.

For a Canadian SMB, most of those use cases are out of reach in the short term. Implementing an AI-powered talent marketplace requires data infrastructure that smaller companies do not have. But two pragmatic AI applications are well within reach right now:

• Faster content development. AI tools can compress what used to be a six-week scriptwriting cycle for a training video into a one-week one. This affects what an external partner can deliver and what it should cost.
• Conversational learning support. A well-prompted AI chatbot loaded with your company's policy documents can act as a first-line answer system for new hires, freeing managers from repetitive questions about how things work.

Both are practical. Neither requires a Chief Learning Officer or a six-figure platform investment. The honest version of the AI story for SMBs is not "transform your workforce" — it is "lower the cost of doing things you would have done anyway."

What this means for your training plan in 2026

If you take only three actions in response to this report, take these:

1. Identify which leadership skills are concentrated in single individuals. Run a 30-minute conversation with your senior team and list the people whose departure would create a meaningful operational gap. This is your real skills risk register, not a list of training topics.
2. Give managers one repeatable career-conversation tool. Not a framework. A single template they can use in a 20-minute one-on-one. The barrier is not motivation, it is the absence of a default tool to reach for.
3. Audit one piece of training that has gone untouched in two years. Most SMBs have at least one foundational programme — onboarding, compliance, manager basics — that has aged badly. Updating it gives you a visible win and a reason to talk to employees about why learning is being prioritised.

None of these requires hiring an L&D team. All three are realistic for a 60-person company to do this quarter.

Part 2 of this series translates the report's "five talent foundations" into a step-by-step playbook for SMBs that want to go further — including what internal mobility looks like in a 75-person company and how to measure career development outcomes without a learning management system.