Survey: Managers are providing less support for employee development

Corporate learning professionals know that the success of employee learning programs depends a lot on support from front-line managers. After all, managers are the ones who either encourage employees to learn and grow — or not — on a daily basis.

It should be a wakeup call, then, to hear that employees believe their managers’ support for these learning efforts has fallen off in the past year.

That’s one of the conclusions that emerges from LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report, covering trends in the year up to September 2024.

Dwindling encouragement to learn

To compile the report, LinkedIn surveyed 937 corporate learning professionals and 679 employee learners at companies around the globe. One set of questions the survey asked employees pertained to their managers’ level of support for learning initiatives and career development.

That’s where the alarming answers came in. In the previous year’s report, 35% of employees surveyed said their managers encouraged them to spend time learning; but in the 2025 report, that figure fell by 6 percentage points, to 29%. Similarly, the percentage of employees reporting that their managers challenged them to learn new skills fell by 5 points, to 24%.

Meanwhile, the share of surveyed employees who reported their managers recommended learning materials skidded 7 points, to 18%; and those reporting their managers helped them build a career development plan fell off 5 points, to 15%.

Too busy to help?

The LinkedIn report didn’t go into detail about why managerial support may have fallen off so markedly, although it did suggest managers felt they were too busy. “Dramatic drops in manager support for their teams point to widespread drains on manager time,” the report said.

The report did put forward steps that organizations can take in order to get managers re-engaged with this important learning function:

• “Provide systems of empowerment to help managers regain their momentum and impact, such as dedicated training and easy-to-use resources,” and
• “Recognition … organizations must shine a spotlight on managers who embrace career-building and internal mobility.”

Depending on your situation, you may want to interview some of your line managers and see how they’re feeling about employee learning, and whether they need help implementing the initiatives you have in place to keep your workforce sharp, skilled, and motivated.

This blog entry is based on LinkedIn’s “Workplace Learning Report 2025: The Rise of Career Champions.”