Quick answer:
- Proving L&D’s value is still a priority (and a challenge)
- If people aren’t engaging, look at the system around the learning
- Managers make or break the outcome
- AI readiness is a behaviour change challenge
This year’s CIPD ACE brought together more than 7,000 HR and L&D professionals, over 130 exhibitors and enough branded merch to stock a small shop. And of course, it brought its usual action-packed conference programme as the industry descended on Manchester Central on 4 and 5 November.
With the Employment Rights Act 2025 at the top of everyone’s to-do list, the mock tribunals returned (the only kind of tribunal anyone wants a front-row seat for). Delegates watched an unfair dismissal case play out and then voted on the outcome. And over in the Navigate AI Lab, live workshops helped people get to grips with the technology everyone has an opinion on.
New CIPD chief executive Neil Carberry OBE set the tone in his first ACE address. Influence should be earned, he said, not asked for, and he gave the room a test to take home: “What changed because we were there?”
It’s a good question for any L&D team. Here are four themes from the conference that shape how L&D can answer it.
1. Proving L&D’s value is still a priority (and a challenge)
Proving impact beyond surface-level indicators has been high on L&D’s agenda for about as long as L&D has existed. The appetite to show change in behaviour and performance is there, but pulling together the evidence is more difficult. In the CIPD’s HR pulse report, published the week before the conference, 91% of people professionals said improving organisational performance is a top priority for their team. Yet only 61% said their function has clear success measures.
On the Leadership and Learning stage, a panel on ‘The role of L&D in supporting a performance-led skills strategy’ used a metaphor to describe how L&D should respond to skills gaps. A great L&D practitioner is an engineer who diagnoses the problem, not a shopkeeper who waits for course requests. The more uncomfortable question was why so many teams are still shopkeeping. If L&D teams keep taking orders, their skills may not be the problem. They may be doing exactly what their organisations expect.
Changing that expectation starts with how L&D shows up. In a separate breakout session, Nicola Johnson Hodgson of Bentley Motors kept her advice simple: “Work with the business, don’t just deliver something you think they’re going to like.”
Learning researcher Laura Overton went a step further. The highest-performing learning teams, she said, put the organisation’s problem first and offer to solve it alongside the business. They also step into rooms they haven’t been invited to, even when it feels like a stretch. As she put it: “I know I’m above my pay grade here but…”
Our take: Stepping into those rooms is easier with the right question to ask. Before agreeing to build anything, ask what people need to do differently and how the business will be able to measure what’s changed. That conversation is often where L&D’s value starts to show. We’ve outlined a balanced L&D measurement model here.
2. If people aren’t engaging, look at the system around the learning
On the exhibition floor, a panel titled ‘The skills crunch’ asked a question every L&D team has wrestled with: how do you get employees engaged in learning? Leadership coach Daniella Freeman, Cezanne’s head of L&D Gemma Glover and OD consultant Chris Baldwin landed on a refreshingly direct answer. If employees aren’t engaging, the system isn’t telling them learning matters.
Most of the fixes the panel proposed sat outside the learning itself. Skills need to tie directly to role expectations. Leaders need to be seen learning too. And people who apply new skills should be recognised and rewarded for it. Freeman added that behaviour change grows from motivation rather than fear, so people need to feel safe enough to experiment and get things wrong.
In ‘Building future-fit leadership through L&D’, Amy Shaw, HR director at SES Engineering Services, highlighted the importance of leaders being vulnerable and visible: “People don’t relate to your perfection as much as they relate to your imperfections. Leaders are no longer seen as superheroes. Showing humility and vulnerability is more important than ever.”
Our take: We’ll admit to some bias here. Video Arts has spent more than 50 years backing the idea that people engage with learning they enjoy. Humour reduces stress, and relatable scenarios make getting something wrong feel like part of the process. Content still needs the system behind it, though, which is why leaders who visibly learn alongside their teams make such a difference.
3. Managers make or break the outcome
Line managers came up again and again across both days, both for how much they matter and how much is being asked of them. Octopus Energy founder Greg Jackson opened day two by explaining how his business runs without a traditional HR division. HR professionals are spread across the business, and the focus is on training managers “to be brilliant”.
Most organisations have some way to go. CIPD data shared at the conference shows just over half of line managers feel they get enough training and support to manage people well.
Across the sessions, speakers encouraged boldness and urged attendees not to wait to equip their people for the changes the Employment Rights Act will bring. From 1 January 2027, the qualifying period for unfair dismissal claims drops from two years to six months. HR consultant Edua Effiom warned that employers can no longer treat probation as a formality. Performance conversations, she said, “need to happen in week two, not month five”. Graeme Drewery of Make UK urged employers to start preparing for greater trade union access rights, making sure managers have what they need.
That’s a big ask for a manager who rarely has difficult conversations, and a simple policy update alone won’t prepare them for it.
Our take: Managers build the confidence to raise a concern early by rehearsing the conversation before it happens. That’s the thinking behind the ‘wrong way, right way’ approach Video Arts has used for decades. Once we’ve watched a manager fumble a probation review (and seen the funny side), the right approach is much easier to remember when it’s our turn.
4. AI readiness is a behaviour change challenge
As expected, AI featured heavily across the agenda, but the biggest barriers speakers described had little to do with the technology itself. Graeme Burns, AI implementation adviser at AI West and former AI people lead at Nationwide, warned against expecting AI to fix things by itself. “It’s not just about training people on tools,” he said. When Nationwide tested its AI proposals against the organisation’s purpose, half of the potential use cases fell away.
In a session on AI adoption, Jo Carlin, HR director at Victrex, put it bluntly: “AI adoption is not primarily an IT project.” She added that AI rules have to be usable, or people either ditch AI or use it in secret. Reluctance can stem from a capability gap as much as fear, and Carlin and Bupa’s Sam Lea-Wilson both argued for being upfront about how roles will change. Bupa’s suggestion was a dedicated sandbox where people can experiment, make mistakes and ask silly questions without any fear.
For L&D, one of the sharpest warnings concerned early careers. Paula Allerton, head of apprenticeships at HMRC, pointed out that AI is taking over routine entry-level tasks. Employers should keep those tasks as learning opportunities, she said, “so that, although we might automate the task, we don’t automate the development.”
Our take: Over-reliance on AI can blunt interpersonal skills too. If AI removes the low-stakes situations where new starters used to learn the ropes, L&D needs to create safe spaces to practise somewhere else. Our AI Coach gives people somewhere to rehearse real workplace conversations, try different responses and build confidence before having the real conversation.
Confidence comes from practice
Performance psychologist Jamil Qureshi’s message was that better performance starts with action. He said that “the route to greater success is to simply do something” and that change sticks when people commit to it.
Proving value, building engagement, backing managers and preparing people for AI all depend on what people do next. Carberry’s challenge ran through the whole conference, and the CIPD signed off with a practical version of it: “What will you do differently on Monday?” Learning teams could ask the same of every programme they run.
If you’d like to give your people more chances to practise their skills, explore our AI Coach and learning library, or get in touch with the team.
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