The Learning and Talent Podcast

“If you have to make learning mandatory, then your learning product has failed.”
- Marina Magdy, Global Learning & Career Development Director, TP

It is a provocative statement, particularly in a profession accustomed to tracking completions, attendance and learning hours. But it gets to the heart of a much bigger question facing Learning leaders today.

As AI becomes embedded across organisations, are leaders simply looking at a new set of tools for L&D? Or are they witnessing a more fundamental shift in how learning itself is designed, delivered and measured?

Ahead of Learning Futures Dubai (27 October, 2026), iVentiv sat down with Marina Magdy, Global Learning and Career Development Director at TP, for a discussion that moved beyond the familiar question of how L&D can use AI and instead explored something potentially much more consequential: what happens when AI begins to change the architecture of learning itself?

From AI tutors and simulations to learner agency, human oversight and performance measurement, the implications reach far beyond content creation and productivity. For Chief Learning Officers, they raise important questions about the future purpose of the Learning function.

What if the future of L&D is less about delivering learning and more about enabling organisations to execute strategy?

In conversation with iVentiv, Satoshi Probala, Global Learning & Development Director at Barry Callebaut, argues that capability building should begin with business priorities, experience matters more than content alone, and L&D’s role could become even more important in the age of AI.

Ahead of attending Learning Futures Basel (13-14 October 2026), Satoshi shares his views on how L&D can move from being a delivery function to one that enables sustainable organisational performance, using practical examples from leadership development, global manufacturing transformation, onboarding, and learning measurement. 

On 1 December 2021, Theresa Cook, then EMEA Talent Development head for TikTok and ByteDance, and her team attended a Town Hall where they were told that the talent development global function was being made redundant."Now, in any organisation that is quite a shock," Theresa recalls, "however, in a startup organisation, which I did sign up for, I also knew that these are the kind of things that might potentially happen."Find out how Theresa handled the situation, finding the best solution for her team and herself, and what that reflects about the culture of agility and adaptability at TikTok in this video.

Skills, reskilling and upskilling are high on the CLO agenda right now. Peter Sheppard, previously the Head of Global L&D Ecosystem at Ericsson, talks about how to demonstrate the value of skills in your organisation and how to tie your reskilling efforts to key business goals in this fascinating interview.

For decades, Learning & Development has been organised around a familiar production model: a business identifies a need, L&D designs a programme, content is created, employees complete it, and despite a genuine desire to measure business impact, success is often reported through attendance, completion rates and satisfaction scores. But the advent of AI is beginning to dismantle that model, not because it can generate a course, produce a video or build a presentation faster, but because it allows L&D to move beyond producing learning assets and take greater responsibility for workforce performance.

Few leaders are exploring this shift as practically as Julie Stone, Chief Learning Officer and Group VP at TTEC. Drawing on more than 20 years of experience across global organisations, Julie is helping to embed AI, adaptive learning and performance-based development into the flow of work. Her perspective challenges many of the maligned assumptions that have shaped the way L&D is perceived for decades, particularly the idea that the function’s primary role is to produce training content.

In this blog, we explore Julie’s view of an AI-enabled L&D function that is faster, more adaptive and more commercially relevant, while remaining deeply human. It is a vision in which AI takes on repetitive and production-heavy work, enabling Learning professionals to focus on judgment, coaching, context and the complex work of changing behaviour. 

In this interview, Dean Cannarozzi, Head of Sika Global Business School, talked to us about his work to reposition Learning and Development (L&D) within Sika as an organisation that has traditionally focused primarily on Talent Development.

The Sika Business School manages a range of learning and talent programmes for Sika, often branded with "leadership" in their titles, which are central to the development of the company's General Managers (GMs), who typically have participated in these programs themselves.

However, Dean highlights a concern: while these talent programs are highly regarded and impactful for those who participate (about 2% of the organisation), there is an underlying issue regarding the engagement and development of the remaining 98% of the workforce.

Dean's goal? To address this disparity and explore solutions for broader employee development.

Skills-based organisations have become one of the biggest talking points for Learning and Talent leaders, but are they a genuine route to greater agility, or just another HR trend wrapped in new language?

In this exclusive iVentiv interview, Vidya Krishnan, then Chief Learning Officer at Ericsson, and Nigel Paine, former Head of People Development at the BBC, explore whether skills-based organisations are hype or hope. Together, they discuss why the shift towards skills is about far more than job architectures or talent marketplaces, and is instead about seeing people as a portfolio of skills, experiences, and potential, and creating organisations where learning, unlearning, and relearning become part of the culture.

For Global Heads of Learning, the conversation offers a timely look at how skills-based thinking can support workforce transformation, unlock internal mobility, and help organisations stay adaptive in the face of rapid technological and market change.

Following iVentiv's Learning Futures Cologne 2024, Richard Parfitt (Marketing Director, iVentiv) spoke to Klaus Scheile (then VP of Learning & Development, T-Systems) to delve into the T-Systems approach to skills and talent development.

Listen to the full interview and read our blog to understand more about how T-Systems fosters a learning-centric culture, empowers personal development, and champions learning at every organisational level.

Leadership Development continues to be a topic of huge interest to Global Heads of Learning, with 60.5% of you highlighting it as one if your priorities so in 2024. In an interview with Berry Lumpkins, then Global Head of Organisational Development at NKT, Berry explained how the organisation has built its approach to Leadership Development from the ground-up, and, crucially, how important it was to have the CEO's buy-in for the whole process.

iVentiv's Hannah Hoey took some time to dive into the dynamic world of Learning & Development (L&D) at Fugro, spearheaded by Wouter Jan Kleinlugtenbelt, the Global Head of L&D.

During this conversation, Wouter Jan talked about Fugro's transformative journey, adapting to cutting-edge technologies like uncrewed vessels and augmented reality, with the aim of enhancing operational excellence.

In this interview, we explore how Fugro integrates L&D with its strategic goals to ensure its workforce is not only skilled but prepared to meet the future demands of the geo-data engineering industry. 

Join us to uncover the intricacies of Fugro's L&D strategies, from onboarding new hires to fostering a culture of continuous Learning & Development.