Lori Niles-Hoffman asked a question during her session at the Learning Technologies Autumn Forum that really interested me.

“Which song best describes your emotion about the state of the L&D industry right now?”

I sat there cycling through my mental music library, and realised every song that came to mind was either a plea for rescue, a confession of exhaustion, or darkly comic resignation.

“All By Myself” when you’re the entire L&D function trying to create, facilitate, measure, and prove ROI with a budget of £47.

“It Wasn’t Me” when people fail standards after ignoring the training you sent three times.

“Where Is The Love?” checking engagement metrics on that expensive platform nobody touches. “Changes” when the organisation restructures for the fifth time this year and your strategy dies again.

“Boulevard of Broken Dreams” for those carefully designed programmes gathering dust because everyone’s trapped in meetings.

Then there’s “Don’t Stop Believin’,” which might be the most telling of all. We keep singing it to ourselves about microlearning and AI-generated content, hoping this time the magic will work.

The question wasn’t meant to be diagnostic. But answers became one anyway.

When an entire profession responds to “how do you feel?” with songs about pressure, isolation, and things not working, that’s worth noticing. Not because we’re melodramatic, but because we’re honest when given permission to be.

We’re measuring completion rates and calling it learning. Building solutions before understanding problems. Proving we’re busy instead of proving we matter. The songs reveal what we already know but rarely say plainly: the work we’re doing isn’t the work that needs doing.

Learning happens in the work, not around it.

Impact lives in behaviour change, not content libraries.

Strategy starts with diagnosis, not solutions.

The playlist tells the truth.

---

#LearningAndDevelopment #WorkplaceLearning ##LearningCulture