2025 Wrap Sheet: Your Top L&D Must Change Articles and Podcast Episodes

What you were most interested in learning, reading, and listening to this year. Spoiler alert: Practical action items won the day.

We made it! As we arrive at the end of 2025, many of us like to pause and reflect.

One of my favorite ways to do that is by looking back at what you engaged with most over the past year. It’s a powerful signal of the current state of our learning and talent development (L&TD) profession. It shows us the questions we’re wrestling with, the challenges rising to the top of our minds, and where we’re collectively hoping to change and grow.

With that lens, I reviewed the most-viewed articles from the L&D Must Change newsletter and the most-downloaded episodes of the L&D Must Change podcast from 2025. Below are the top five from each, along with a few honorable mentions. Diving into each of these is an excellent way to round out your year in learning and talent development!

The Podcast

This year you leaned in to listen from experts talking about what matters most in L&TD. Topics like change management, content creation, becoming a strategic business partner, AI, and measurement all rose to the top. Followed closely by conversations on your L&D career and organizing our function for results.

None of this surprised me given the current state of our industry. Change is constant in nearly every organization I encounter, driven by mergers and acquisitions, reorganizations, rapid digital transformation, and large-scale system implementations. That reality also explains the strong interest in career navigation (Should I be doing something different? I was laid off... what now?) and in understanding how AI fits into our work. Collectively, it seems we’re asking big questions about the future of our profession and how to prepare for what’s next.

Top 5 Most Downloaded L&D Must Change Podcast Episodes of 2025

Here are the top five episodes and the honorable mentions in order of most downloaded:

1. Episode 20. The Intersection of L&D and Change Management with Jody Lumsden, EdD: L&D and change management may be different professions, but they are deeply interconnected.

2. Episode 38. Build Learners, Not Libraries with Irma Horvath: What if the real power of L&D isn’t in the content we deliver, but in teaching people how to direct their own growth?

3. Episode 37. Order Taker No More! with Jess Almlie: We turned the tables as I shared the stories behind my new book, L&D Order Taker No More! and how small, intentional steps can move L&D from transactional work to strategic impact.

4. Episode 26. AI Isn't a Tool, It's a Team Member with Josh Penzell: This conversation isn’t about learning prompts. It’s about mindset, imagination, and rethinking what's possible with AI.

5. Episode 22. Designing and Measuring on Purpose with Chris Taylor: When we clearly define purpose up front, everything from design to measurement becomes more effective and impactful. 

Podcast Honorable Mentions

• Episode 29: Flipping the Script on Your L&D Career with Sarah Cannistra

• Episode 42: Organizing L&D for Results with Guus van Deelen

The Newsletter

When it came to the newsletter, practical action clearly won the day. You engaged most with articles that offered ideas you could apply immediately. In many ways, this reinforced one of my favorite mantras: Most people know why they need to change. They just need help with how.

Yes, we know that we need to ask different questions of stakeholders, shift how we work to deliver results, push back on requests, navigate difficult partnerships, and measure our impact. The challenge is figuring out exactly how to do that. You love practical, easy to apply tips and ideas.

Top 5 Most Read L&D Must Change Newsletter Articles of 2025

1. The Most Underused L&D Superpower: Facilitation: Why facilitation skills, when used outside the classroom, can strengthen partnerships, improve collaboration, and increase strategic influence.

2. Our Collective Question Bank: What to Ask Stakeholders Requesting Training: A crowdsourced set of diagnostic questions to help determine whether training will actually solve the problem.

3. Do We Want Behavior Change or Information Transfer? A look at the critical difference between knowing and doing, and what it takes to design for real behavior change.

4. All the L&D Skills = An Impossible Feat? Why success in L&D depends more on non-technical skills than we often acknowledge.

5. Does Saying "No" Damage L&D's Reputation? How moving beyond yes/no responses can build credibility and position L&D as a true strategic business partner.

Honorable Mentions

• How to Start Creating Your L&D Measurement Strategy: A simple measurement audit as a way to overcome paralysis and build momentum.

• Difficult Stakeholders Aren't Resisting Learning, They're Protecting the Business: Reframing resistance to transform challenging relationships into strong partnerships.