Learning How to Learn: The Key Skill in the AI Era
L2L, The Key Skill in the AI Era - a topic that CLO LIFT's leading practitioners are actively exploring. Thanks to Noah Rabinowitz, Kati Clement-Frazier, Sandra Loughlin, Emily Lin and Michele Graham.
Learning how to learn - The ability to learn quickly, and to translate learning into practice, may be the single most important skill to develop in the AI era. In a world of constant disruption, and accelerating change, it’s the difference between thriving and falling behind.
And yet, if we’re honest, we could be a lot better at helping our people learn how to learn.
Not just employees, but also us, the leaders of learning.
How many of us can confidently explain to employees how to learn effectively (with or without AI)?
How many of us can prove to our executive colleagues that employees actually learned something in our programs, and that it translated into measurable business value?
Why the Old Paradigm is Broken
For decades, corporate learning has been organized around inputs: how many courses we launch, how many hours people spend, how many “graduates” we produce.
This approach may have been tolerable in a slower, more predictable world. But it simply doesn’t work in an era where skills must be acquired, applied, and adapted in real time.
The gap between what employees need to learn and what traditional L&D actually delivers is widening.
And unless we change the paradigm, L&D risks becoming irrelevant at the very moment the world needs it most.
A New Paradigm: Learning How to Learn
What we need is a paradigm rooted in science, not slogans. Grounded in evidence, not expedience.
The core of that paradigm is learning how to learn. Not just delivering content, but helping people master the meta-skills that allow them to:
Rapidly acquire new skills.
Apply them in the messy flow of work.
Reflect, adapt, and transfer them across contexts.
Use AI not as a shortcut, but as an amplifier of their thinking and performance.
As Demis Hassabis, CEO of DeepMind, put it recently in Athens: “One thing we’ll know for sure is you’re going to have to continually learn throughout your career.”
That requires a workforce fluent in the meta-skills of learning how to learn and critical thinking — capacities that cut across every industry, role, and level.
The CLO LIFT Blueprint
At CLO LIFT, a collaborative of Chief Learning Officers from some of the world’s leading organizations, we are working to build that blueprint. Our mission is to move beyond content libraries and conference slogans to create standards, practices, and ecosystems that actually accelerate learning in the flow of work.
The organizations we admire don’t treat learning as a silo. They treat it as a living system, deeply embedded in how work gets done. That means:
Leadership that signals permission to experiment.
Routines that normalize reflection.
Data systems that measure behavior change, not just completions.
Talent pathways that enable movement, not just measurement.
This is the direction we must go if L&D is to remain relevant and essential in the era of AI.
Join the Conversation
We don’t have all the answers. But we know the old answers aren’t enough. That’s why we’re asking you to weigh in.
What topics about learning how to learn should we explore?
What myths or misconceptions need to be called out?\
What aspects of effective learning environments should we amplify?
Join us on this journey.
CLO LIFT is a project led by senior CLOs at global companies, in partnership with Docebo, Udemy, and Harvard University, hosted by The Learning Forum.