How Talent Leaders Are Reinventing Employee Training with Surface

For years, employee training programs have largely been designed the same way: identify a broad capability gap, build a curriculum, track completion rates, and hope it translates into better outcomes.

But the expectations facing talent leaders have changed dramatically.

Today, organizations are asking L&D teams to help accelerate AI adoption, improve manager effectiveness, increase productivity, strengthen retention, and prepare employees for rapidly evolving roles. At the same time, they’re facing increasing pressure to prove the impact of their investments on real business outcomes.

The challenge is that most organizations still design training programs without a complete understanding of what’s actually happening inside the company, and in many cases, what matters most to the business. The signals that should shape learning strategy — organizational priorities, industry trends, workforce planning priorities, engagement data, performance trends, attrition patterns, promotion readiness, and manager effectiveness — live across disconnected systems.

That’s where Surface is changing the equation.

Because Surface brings together fragmented data into a unified people intelligence layer, organizations can move beyond generic learning programs to expertly-designed training strategies grounded in their actual business priorities, organizational hotspots, and workforce needs. 

Here are just a few ways we’re seeing Surface fundamentally reinvent how learning and development programs are designed, prioritized, measured, and scaled.

Building an L&D Strategy Tied Directly to Business Priorities

One of the biggest challenges talent leaders face is ensuring training investments are aligned to what the business actually needs most.

Traditionally, creating a strategic enterprise-wide learning strategy required pulling together workforce data, engagement insights, strategic priorities, leadership feedback, and organizational planning documents. Because these data all live in different systems, most companies didn’t take this rigorous approach. They looked at what they did last year, what other companies were doing, and whatever compliance required, resulting in programs that were too broad and often disconnected from the company’s highest-priority business goals.

With Surface, organizations can design a much more targeted strategy because the platform already understands:

• The organization’s strategic priorities 
• Where workforce or culture hotspots exist through Surface’s unified data layer
• The engagement levels and strengths of different employee groups 
• How the organization compares to peers on critical talent dimensions
• Which interventions are most likely to drive measurable improvement

For example, imagine a company undergoing a major AI transformation. The leadership team’s priority is increasing AI adoption and helping teams adapt quickly as roles and workflows evolve.

Instead of producing a generic “future of work” learning program, with Surface, a talent leader can design a multi-track development strategy designed for different employee audiences — executives, people managers, and individual contributors — while incorporating the organization’s real business context, workforce challenges, and operational constraints.

In one recent workflow, Surface helped design a large-scale enablement program for 2,000 managers navigating AI-driven organizational change. 

The program included:

• A six-module curriculum focused on adaptability, coaching, accountability, and AI-era team management
• Cohort-based learning structures designed for scale
• Reinforcement mechanisms for behavior change
• A staged rollout strategy to support facilitation capacity
• A measurement framework tied to performance and organizational outcomes

Rather than simply generating ideas, Surface produced a stakeholder-ready draft that connected the learning strategy directly to the organization’s transformation goals and broader business strategy. 

Uncovering Organizational Challenges That Learning Can Solve

Another powerful use case is helping organizations identify capability gaps where targeted development could have an outsized impact.

For example, Surface may identify through engagement data, attrition patterns, and employee feedback that the employee experience varies dramatically by manager. 

That creates significant organizational risk. Employees can have completely different experiences depending on which team they join leading to inconsistent engagement, retention, development, and performance outcomes.

Surface can proactively flag this as a hotspot and recommend targeted interventions. For one recent customer, Surface identified an opportunity to reduce “culture by manager” variance by strengthening manager capability and accountability.

The platform recommended L&D tactics including targeted coaching for managers and leaders and creating individualized development plans tied to leadership competencies. It also recommended additional tactics that would make those L&D efforts more successful: strengthening accountability mechanisms around manager behaviors; building more consistent management expectations across the organization; and continuing to track manager effectiveness through employee feedback. 

Rather than simply calling out the problem, Surface helps talent leaders connect the insight to an actionable development strategy.

Measuring the Real Impact of Learning 

Most organizations still measure training effectiveness using relatively limited signals:

• Completion rates
• Attendance
• Learner satisfaction surveys
• Knowledge checks

Those metrics rarely answer the most important question: Did the training actually improve organizational outcomes?

Because Surface connects learning data with broader talent and business data, organizations can begin measuring training impact much more holistically.

For example, organizations can connect L&D programs to outcomes like:

• Employee engagement
• Retention
• Promotion readiness
• Productivity
• Performance ratings
• Skill proficiency at the team and enterprise levels
• Manager effectiveness
• Internal mobility

For large organizations and those where role-based certifications are skills are critical, Surface can also make an L&D leader’s life much easier. Instead of manually trying to determine where capability gaps exist, Surface can help them quickly understand:

• Which business units or teams are under-skilled for emerging priorities
• Where certification or readiness gaps exist
• Which employee populations need additional support
• Whether training programs are actually improving performance outcomes over time

This not only helps talent leaders better quantify the learning team’s impact, it allows them to speak the language of the business more effectively. Rather than positioning L&D as a standalone initiative, they can connect learning investments directly to workforce performance, organizational readiness, and strategic execution.

A New Era for Learning and Development

All of this is happening as the broader learning landscape itself is transforming in the era of AI. Employees increasingly expect support that is immediate, contextual, and embedded into the flow of work while organizations are under pressure to build skills faster and tie learning investments more directly to business outcomes.

Instead of designing programs based primarily on intuition, isolated survey results, or generic best practices, organizations can now build learning strategies grounded in a much more complete understanding of their workforce. Surface helps organizations identify where support is needed and execute smarter learning strategies. Then, our Reach platform helps deliver expert-led learning experiences at scale with compelling content and personalized coaching and in-the-flow support that translates learning to action. 

Together, they help organizations build more adaptable, high-performing workforces equipped to navigate constant transformation.