Most organizations have spent the last several years pouring money into learning platforms, courses, and content libraries. Perceptyx's inaugural State of Learning & Development report asks a harder question than whether employees are using any of them: can employees see where all of that learning is supposed to be taking them? The report draws on a July 2026 Workforce Panel of 2,992 employed individuals across North America and Europe.
Employees are not skeptical that development works. Seventy-four percent say learning happens within the daily flow of work instead of being pulled out of it, and nearly the same share say it produces behavior change that lasts. That's a strong foundation, and it's not where the story gets complicated.
The difficulties begin surfacing one level up. Most employees can tell you exactly which skills they personally need to build next, but notably fewer believe their organization is doing that same work on their behalf. Fewer still think anyone is actively preparing them for the future roles and shifting skill demands ahead.
Just over half of employees can point to a clear learning strategy for the next year or two, which leaves nearly half without one. It's not just an employee perception problem. HR leaders appear to be making the same near-term trade-off. Perceptyx benchmark data shows that L&D strategies at most organizations are built primarily around skills needed within the next one to two years, with very few extending that horizon any further.
This narrow window is a risk the report spends time on, particularly given how fast core job skills are projected to shift across industries in the years ahead.
One relationship in the data stands out above the rest. Employees who believe their organization is actively building skills for future roles are far more likely to see a real, workable path for reskilling as their job changes. Take away that belief, and the reskilling path mostly disappears with it.
The same divide shows up in how employees rate their entire L&D experience, from whether leaders treat learning as essential to whether they are personally engaged at work and planning to stay. Correlation is not causation, but when the same gap keeps appearing across that many measures, it warrants serious attention. The full report maps out exactly where those gaps are widest.
Having access to learning is not the same as seeing a future because of it, and employees distinguish between the two. Most employees say they can get to learning that would help their career, but considerably fewer can name an actual opportunity waiting on the other side of it. This gap is most evident among individual contributors.
Career stage further complicates the picture. Younger employees see meaningfully more opportunities ahead of them than employees later in their careers, a pattern the report breaks down by age group. What the data suggests is that organizations may be defining career growth too narrowly. Promotion is one path. Lateral moves, reskilling, and expanded scope are others, but only if they are formalized and visible enough for employees to see them as real destinations rather than consolation prizes.
Learning that never gets used doesn't do much good. What happens after a course ends turns out to matter as much as the course itself. Employees who feel learning is genuinely improving their performance are far more likely to say their manager actively pushes them to apply new skills afterward. Without that sense of improvement, manager follow-through nearly disappears from employees' accounts.
Time is the constraint sitting underneath it all. Barely more than half of employees say they have enough room in their actual working hours to participate in learning in the first place.
The view from the corner office and the view from the front line are not the same report. Executives are considerably more likely than individual contributors to see a clear learning strategy, understand where their organization is headed, and believe they're being prepared for future roles. That's not surprising given who sits closest to the strategy conversations that produce this clarity in the first place, but it does mean the employees furthest from those conversations are the ones least equipped to answer the very question this report is built around.
A parallel gap also shows up geographically. North American and European employees report meaningfully different levels of support around learning, even though how much that learning changes their actual behavior looks similar across both regions. Whatever is driving the difference has more to do with the environment surrounding learning than with learning itself.
The gap between learning access and learning direction runs through every finding above. Four questions organize the recommendations, and each one points toward a different fix.
The full report goes deeper on each of these questions, including what separates organizations getting this right from the ones still catching up.
Not according to what employees report. Perceptyx's 2026 State of Learning & Development report found that organizations tend to define career growth too narrowly. Lateral moves, reskilling for a different role, and taking on expanded responsibilities are all legitimate paths forward. When those options aren't presented as real destinations, employees who aren't on a promotion track often can't see any path at all. Building a formal reskilling pathway is one of the more direct ways organizations can make that alternative visible, rather than leaving it as an informal option employees have to piece together on their own.
Access to learning and a visible career path are two different things. Perceptyx's 2026 State of Learning & Development report found that most employees can reach learning resources that would help their career, but considerably fewer can name a real opportunity waiting on the other side. Without a visible destination, learning access alone doesn't produce career confidence.
Considerably. Perceptyx's 2026 State of Learning & Development report found that employees who feel learning is improving their performance are far more likely to report that their manager actively encourages them to apply new skills on the job. Employees who don't feel that benefit report almost no manager encouragement. Time compounds the problem: barely more than half of employees say they have enough room in their working hours to participate in learning in the first place.
No. Perceptyx's 2026 State of Learning & Development report found that executives are considerably more likely than individual contributors to see a clear learning strategy, understand where their organization is headed, and believe they're being built for future roles. Career stage adds another layer: younger employees see meaningfully more opportunity ahead than employees later in their careers. The employees who most need a clear development path are often the ones least likely to see one, which is usually less about individual manager effort and more about whether career pathways are mapped out and communicated consistently across the organization, not just left to trickle down from the top.
Find out how your organization's approach to L&D compares with the Perceptyx People Strategy Assessment, a free diagnostic covering six areas: organizational priorities, scale, culture, listening maturity, AI maturity, and L&D.
Download the full State of Learning & Development report for the complete findings.