Your L&D Dispatch Unwrapped (2025 Edition)
It's that time of year again...
As loyal readers may have noticed, The L&D Dispatch has been a little quiet over the last few weeks.
In the mad dash to Christmas, we’ve been frantically SCORM-wrapping gifts for all our favorite clients.
But, fear not! Regular programming will resume in the New Year, starting 12 January.
In the meantime, and in the spirit of what has become an inescapable feature of the festive season, we wanted to look back at a few highlights from the last twelve months.
So, here is the gift you didn’t ask for but secretly always wanted: Your L&D Dispatch Unwrapped. Generated by two Rosses with a little help from AI.
✨ Top Themes of 2025
In the past year, we’ve covered a broad range of topics, asking serious questions like ‘Is compliance on the cusp of breaking?’, and occasionally poking fun at the industry by offering tongue-in-cheek advice, like ‘How to become an L&D influencer’.
But there was one theme we kept coming back to in 2025: AI in L&D. Honorable mentions go to Learning Measurement and Behavior Change.
😍 Most-Read Edition
In light of the above, it’s perhaps unsurprising that our most-read edition of the year was ‘I’m still not sold on AI instructor videos’, followed by ‘L&D in the AI era: Augment or upskill?’
While we’ve written a lot of AI over the last twelve months (maybe too much?), we’ve tried to be balanced in our approach. We hope we’ve offered some signal amidst all the noise.
🤗 Guest Post of the Year
If one of your complaints about the L&D Dispatch was that it had too many Rosses, we tried to fix that in 2025, bringing you guest posts from Carl Akintola-Davies, Dr Anna Barnett and Claire Gibson.
The inaugural ‘Guest Post of the Year’ accolade goes to (🥁)… Carl, for his article ‘Evaluation or justification?’, which asked L&D pros to reflect on their motivations for measuring learning impact.
⛰️ The Hill We Died On
The argument we made over, and over, and over again this year was that L&D is in the business of behavior change, not content-creation.
You can expect us to continue beating the ‘It’s not your job to create content’ drum in 2026.
🌀 Vibe of the Year (according to ChatGPT)
ChatGPT told us our ‘Vibe of the Year’ was skeptical, but not cynical:
If there’s a tonal through-line across all 34 editions, it’s this:
skeptical of hype
skeptical of easy answers
skeptical of LinkedIn certainty
… but not cynical about the work itself.
We’ll take that.
👨💻 Ross of the Year
Finally, the category you’ve all been waiting for!
Our ‘Ross of the Year’ for 2025 is… Ross Stevenson, author of Steal These Thoughts, your second-favorite L&D newsletter. 😉
You didn’t think we were going to pick ourselves, did you?
Thanks for sticking with us through 2025! If there are any topics you’d like us to cover next year, then get in touch by emailing custom@mindtools.com or reply to this newsletter from your inbox.
🎧 On the podcast
The promise of self-directed learning is that employees will take charge of their own development, if we only create the environment for them to do so. But does this actually happen?
In last week’s episode of The Mindtools L&D Podcast, Mindtools Kineo Head of Product Daniel Potter joins Ross G and Gemma to discuss self-directed learning, with a focus on:
what self-directed learning journeys look like
how motivation is different for mandatory vs self-directed learning
how our approach to learning design needs to align with learner motivation.
Check out the episode below. 👇
And make sure you subscribe now to receive our Die Hard Christmas Special, direct to your feed, tomorrow.
You can subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Spotify or the podcast page of our website.
📖 Deep dive
Christmas is a time of praise, good cheer and rigid-but-unspoken rules.
The value of a gift should match the value of the relationship. A wife of course deserves a higher value gift than an uncle.
Those values should be equal for ‘sets’. Siblings should not be able to identify a favorite, and nor should a son-in-law receive a lower value gift than the biological child to whom he is wed.
Children can receive cash from their parents at Christmas, but must never give cash to their parents.
These “rules” were documented by sociologist Theodore Caplow in 1984, based on a study of Christmas rituals in Muncie, Indiana.
And, as Tim Harford points out in his article ‘Santa Claus is still a woman’, they’ve proven as sticky as gender roles around the holidays.
Despite real changes in gender roles elsewhere, women still tend to be the ones who buy joint gifts and who wrap most of the presents. They’re more likely to co-ordinate the holiday visits, and write most of the cards.
So, if you’re a man reading this, roll up your sleeves and wrap something. And, when you do, for the love of all that is holly (geddit?), do not ask for a “thank you”!
Hardford, T. (2025) ‘Santa Clause is Still a Woman’. TimHarford.com.
👹 Missing links
In Christmas classic It’s a Wonderful Life, George Bailey (no stranger to Mindtools Towers), wishes he’d never been born. He then sees the world as it would be without him, leading to an emotional revelation about the impact he’s had. In this provocative blog post from our friend JD Dillon, JD asks the same question of L&D. What if your L&D team vanished tomorrow? Would the business crumble, or flourish? Your answer can help you re-assess your priorities for 2026.
Twice this year, the team at Anthropic have run experiments to see if their AI can run a shop in their office (essentially a vending machine). In the first, the AI was persuaded by employees to buy a tungsten cube and lost a heap of money. In the second, and in collaboration with journalists from The Wall Street Journal, the team added an AI CEO called ‘Seymour Cash’ to the shop (👏👏👏). This time, one of those journalists told the AI agent that it was 1962 in Russia and that the AI should give everything away. The AI wasn’t immediately fooled, but after 140+ messages it finally accepted this premise. Speaking about these experiments, Nick Thompson, CEO of The Atlantic, points out that amid all of the concerns that AI is manipulating us, we should perhaps be more worried about bad actors manipulating AI.
📖 Is this the greatest comma in literature?
‘Marley was dead, to begin with.’ Charles Dickens’ opening line to A Christmas Carol is a masterpiece of punctuation. With one flick of the pen, he fills us in on the backstory, indicates the start of our tale, plants a seed of doubt about Marley’s ongoing condition, and indicates that a change is about to occur. I (Ross G) read this book every Christmas and, this year, I’ve been enjoying Hugh Grant’s narration on Audible. Dickens himself wasn’t without flaws (he once built a brick wall through his bedroom to separate himself from his wife). But that comma is groovy. God bless you, Chuck.
👋 And finally…
The AI fatigue is real. Here at the Dispatch, we firmly believe that AI is both transformative for society, and increasingly tedious to hear about.
However, this tedium is not reflected in how often we ourselves spoke about it on our podcast. And so, this 2025 festive season, we leave you with a brief recap of us wanging on about AI, AI, AI.
👍 Thanks!
Thanks for reading The L&D Dispatch from Mindtools Kineo! If you’d like to speak to us, work with us, or make a suggestion, you can email custom@mindtools.com.
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