By Gwen Mdinaradze

A company can offer excellent courses and still struggle to change how work gets done. Employees return from training to full calendars, familiar expectations and limited opportunities to practise. Leaders see participation, but the connection to performance remains unclear.

As the founder of EdBridge and a doctoral researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, I approach this as a question of organizational design. What surrounds the learning? Do managers help people apply it? Do performance expectations support the behaviours being taught? Can useful knowledge reach the next team that needs it?

Those questions help explain what a learning ecosystem means and why it matters for growth.

What Is A Learning Ecosystem?

I use the term to describe the connected people, practices, resources and expectations that help an organization develop, share and apply knowledge.

A course is one possible component. Others include coaching, challenging assignments, peer relationships, feedback and access to reliable guidance. The ecosystem also includes decisions about workload, recognition and promotion because those decisions influence whether people can use what they learn. However, the learning ecosystem is connected not only to learning practices but also to business outcomes. A learning ecosystem can contribute to competitive advantage when it develops people’s capabilities in ways that support the organization’s strategic goals and growth. 

Consider a manager learning to delegate. A program can introduce useful approaches; however, their development also depends on opportunities to practise, feedback from colleagues and a senior leader who allows them to give others responsibility.

When those conditions align, development becomes part of daily work. When they conflict, the employee has to work around the organization to apply what they've learned. 

A learning ecosystem can be built on three pillars: assessment and data analysis, learning design and execution, and alignment with what the business needs to grow.

Examples of Learning Ecosystem Elements in Practice 

These examples illustrate specific practices within broader organizational systems. They do not establish that any company has solved every learning challenge or that these practices alone caused financial success.

1. Toyota: Learning Through Daily Improvement

Toyota describes continuous improvement as part of its production system. Employees contribute to daily improvements, and operators can stop the line when they detect an abnormality. The company connects this system to quality, lower costs and shorter lead times. 

An element of the learning ecosystem in this case is that employees have a way to surface problems within production itself. For leaders building a learning ecosystem, the question is practical: when someone identifies a problem, what authority and support do they have to help improve the work?

2. Pixar: Feedback On Work In Progress

In his 2014 account of Pixar’s Braintrust, Ed Catmull describes recurring meetings where experienced colleagues examine films in development and offer candid feedback. He also describes leadership’s continuing responsibility to address the fears that can prevent honest discussion.

In the learning ecosystem, this illustrates how a regular work process can support learning. Feedback arrives while the product can still change. Leaders elsewhere can create similar opportunities to examine proposals, customer experiences or projects before decisions become difficult to reverse.

3. Google: Employees Helping Colleagues Learn

Google’s re:Work guide describes its Googler-to-Googler network, or g2g. Employee volunteers teach, coach colleagues and develop learning materials. Google also describes selecting and supporting facilitators, recognizing their contributions and securing leadership support. 

The useful lesson extends beyond asking experts to give presentations. In the learning ecosystem, components include peer learning, which needs time, preparation and support. A business can begin with a recurring problem and connect employees who need help with colleagues who have relevant knowledge and the ability to teach it. 

Many organizations miss what employees truly need to perform better because they do not use anonymous assessments to gather honest feedback. As a result, learning initiatives often fail to reflect employees’ needs or address the challenges revealed by the data.

4. IBM: Connecting Learning Resources With Human Support

IBM illustrates how different parts of a learning ecosystem can work together. Its Your Learning platform provides learning resources, while Your Guides connects employees with mentors and coaches who can help them apply that knowledge to work challenges, such as coding or project management.

The ecosystem connection is between learning, human support and practical application. Employees can access information and seek guidance on using it in their own work. This shows how a platform and relationships can support capability development together.

These examples show different elements of a learning ecosystem. The public sources describe particular practices. They don’t give us enough information to assess how every part of each company’s system works together. Thus, I would describe them as examples of the learning ecosystem elements, rather than complete models. 

How Leaders Can Build One

Begin with a business need

Choose a problem worth solving. Perhaps new employees take too long to work independently, customer issues recur, or teams struggle with handoffs. Identify what people need to become better at and check whether a skill gap is actually part of the problem. Training cannot give employees authority that a policy withholds. Organizations can identify these problems through anonymous surveys and confidential interviews, then analyze the findings to understand what holds employees back from performing better and working more efficiently. A trusted third party can help employees feel safer sharing honest feedback, especially while the organization is still building trust and a workplace where people feel comfortable speaking up.

Understand the employee experience

Go beyond asking employees what training they want. Use job and task analysis, an approach used in industrial-organizational psychology, to identify what their work requires and the capabilities needed to perform it well. Combine this with observation or job shadowing to understand how work actually happens. Ask employees to walk through specific situations where work went well or broke down, then examine factors such as unclear responsibilities, difficult handoffs, limited access to tools or conflicting expectations.

A research methodologist can help select appropriate methods, protect confidentiality and compare employee accounts with observations and performance data. This helps distinguish a development need from a problem that requires changes to management practices or work processes. Design learning around those findings.

Connect learning to everyday work

Plan how employees will apply what they learn, who will support them and how they will review progress. For example, an employee developing negotiation skills could prepare for a supplier discussion, practise with a colleague or a customized AI tool designed to simulate relevant scenarios, and use feedback to improve before the actual conversation. Managers can reinforce this process through feedback and further opportunities to practise, helping employees build capability over time.

Give managers clear responsibilities

Managers influence whether development survives competing demands. They need to discuss learning needs, make room for practice, and provide constructive feedback. They also need to create an environment where employees feel safe asking questions, admitting uncertainty, and seeking help without fear of embarrassment or punishment. Leaders should agree on what work will be reduced or reorganized, because adding development expectations without addressing workload creates a predictable conflict.

Make useful knowledge easier to share

When a team finds a better way to work, test whether it helps, document what changed, and share it with others who could benefit. Assign someone to keep the guidance up to date, including when the approach is useful and when it may need to be adapted.

Measure application and relevant results

To understand whether learning is making a difference, leaders need to look at who participates, whether employees can demonstrate the skills they have learned, and how they apply those skills in everyday work. They can then examine whether those changes contribute to the business outcomes the learning was designed to support.

For example, if the goal is to help employees solve customer problems more effectively, leaders could assess whether employees identify the underlying issue correctly and whether customers need to contact the company again about the same problem. Comparing these measures before and after the learning initiative can help reveal progress, while considering other changes, such as staffing or product improvements, helps avoid giving learning credit for results it may not have caused. 

Organizations often overwhelm employees with separate assessments and surveys from different vendors, asking similar questions without showing how their feedback leads to change. A well-designed learning ecosystem coordinates these efforts so that each assessment has a clear purpose and the findings inform what happens next.

For a focused learning initiative, two main assessment points may be enough: one at the beginning to understand employees’ needs and establish a starting point, and another after employees have had time to apply their learning to assess progress. Managers can support development between these points through regular conversations, practice and feedback, with additional assessments used only when there is a clear need. Employees should also hear what the organization learned from their responses and what it will change as a result.

Assessment design matters as much as the assessment itself. Questions about attendance and satisfaction can tell us whether employees participated and found the experience useful, but they cannot establish whether employees developed new capabilities or improved their work.

More useful questions ask employees to describe a change and provide evidence: “What can you do now that you struggled with before?” “Describe a situation where you applied what you learned. What did you do differently, and what happened?” and “What still prevents you from using this skill effectively?”

These responses should be considered alongside practical demonstrations, manager observations and relevant business measures. For example, after negotiation training, an employee could demonstrate how they prepare for a difficult discussion and explain the reasoning behind their choices, while their manager examines how they apply those skills in actual supplier conversations. This gives leaders a stronger basis for judging progress and determining whether learning was a worthwhile investment than simply asking whether employees enjoyed the course.

The Connection To Competitive Advantage

As a founder and doctoral researcher, I am interested in how learning helps a business become capable of doing something it could not do before. A growth strategy may require entering a new market, serving more customers or adopting new technology, but its success depends partly on whether people can develop the judgment and skills to carry it out.

As the company expands, relying on a few experienced individuals to solve every difficult problem can slow decisions and limit growth. A learning ecosystem can help more employees build that capability by connecting development with real responsibilities, feedback and access to others’ knowledge. When useful learning becomes part of shared practices, the organization can retain and build on it as people move between roles.

The potential competitive advantage comes from how effectively those connections help the business respond to customers, improve decisions and adapt to change. Competitors can buy similar courses or technology, but developing trusted relationships, management practices and building positive organizational cultures that help people learn and apply knowledge consistently takes time. For leaders, the question is whether that capability produces improvements that customers value and competitors find difficult to match.