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Businesses are driven by a lot of things: a mission to serve customers well, a founder's obsession with a problem, a board's growth targets. Strip all of that away, though, and every company has to do one thing to survive: make money.
Analysts track that in two numbers: top line, the total revenue a company brings in, and bottom line, what's left after expenses.
To protect the bottom line, a company really only has two levers: grow revenue, or cut costs. In a tight quarter, most reach for the second lever first; and the department that quietly takes the hit is often the one actually driving the first lever.
Learning and development gets treated as a nice-to-have precisely when it matters most.
That instinct is starting to shift, at least on paper. The share of executives who see L&D as "a cost rather than an investment" fell from 54% in 2022 to 41% in 2025, and roughly 90% of organizations kept training budgets flat or grew them last year.
The catch: budgets that survive going into 2026 tend to be the ones that can point to a business result, not the ones that simply feel worthwhile.
The short version: nurturing a learning culture means treating employee development as a continuous, embedded part of how work gets done, not an annual event; and building the incentives, manager habits, and content flow that make ongoing learning the default rather than the exception.
- L&D is no longer the automatic first budget cut it used to be; but it does have to prove impact to keep its funding, especially heading into a cautious 2026.
- Companies with a genuinely strong culture have historically outgrown weaker-culture peers by roughly 4x on revenue and 8x on employee growth, per Deloitte's analysis of an 11-year performance study.
- The payoff shows up concretely in sales: formal enablement programs post a 49% vs. 42.5% win rate advantage, and Gartner's research ties formal programs to 15–25% higher quota attainment.
- Real Disprz customers across insurance, retail, banking, and real estate show the same pattern: 90%+ completion rates, 50%+ faster onboarding, and double-digit business-outcome gains, once learning stops being an afterthought.
- The 70-20-10 model still holds up as a starting structure (on the job, through people, and through formal training) as long as the formal 10% is genuinely worth an employee's attention.
See how Disprz helps L&D prove the business case behind the culture.Book a demo.
The Cost of Cutting Learning First
L&D is a strange budget line because it's built to pay off slowly. A few hundred thousand dollars thrown at a sales incentive can move a quarter's numbers almost immediately.
The same amount spent on training shows results over months, sometimes years; and a company often only recognizes the value of that training in hindsight, after something goes wrong that proper training would have prevented.
Cutting the learning budget absolutely saves money in the short term. What it doesn't account for is the cost of not training people: the employees who leave because they don't see a growth path, the new hire who takes twice as long to become productive, the frontline mistake that a five-minute refresher module would have caught.
Singapore Airlines Bet on Training. It Paid Off.
Look at aviation, an industry where margins are thin and competition is brutal.Singapore Airlines has been rated the world's best airline for over two decades running, and it has done that while consistently posting profits. It didn't get there by cutting its training spend; it got there by spending more on training than almost any other airline in the world.
Singapore Airlines doesn't treat training as a luxury; it treats it as infrastructure. The airline runs one of the longest-standing customer training programs of any carrier, and that discipline is a big part of why it keeps winning awards most competitors have stopped chasing.
Other airlines have taken notice: AirAsia created a Chief Customer Happiness Officer role specifically to push frontline staff training further, chasing the same customer-experience edge.
Beyond the Anecdote: What Training Actually Moves
The Singapore Airlines story is compelling, but it's also just one story. The broader data holds up the same pattern across industries.
On the sales side specifically: organizations with formal sales enablement programs post a 49% win rate on forecasted deals against 42.5% for those without, andGartner's sales research found formal programs deliver 15–25% higher quota attainment. Sales training itself is frequently cited at a 353% average ROI across repeated Korn Ferry / CSO Insights studies; among the highest-return investments a company can make, when the training is actually good.
On the productivity side, a widely cited IBM study on the value of training found that 71% of CEOs rank human capital as their leading source of sustained economic value, ahead of products, customer relationships, or brand. The same research found that teams receiving 40 hours of training per member hit their major project objectives three times as often as teams that received 30 hours or less, and organizations with strong learning programs saw a 10% productivity lift and roughly $70,000 in annual savings compared to those without.
Three-quarters of managers surveyed named training a crucial factor in project success.
Put those two data sets side by side and the message is consistent, whether you're looking at closing deals or shipping projects: better-trained teams outperform, and the gap is large enough to show up on a spreadsheet, not just in employee sentiment surveys.
What This Looks Like in Practice, by Industry
The abstract case for a learning culture is easy to agree with and easy to ignore. The industry-specific version is harder to wave away, because the numbers come from companies solving the exact problem a reader in that industry is probably staring at right now.
Insurance: distributed agents, inconsistent skill
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance had 7,000+ employees across corporate and frontline sales roles, and no single system tying their learning, performance, and assessment data together. After building a unified, AI-driven skilling platform with Disprz, the insurer hit a 95%+ course completion rate and won the Celent Model Insurer Award in 2021 for the resulting "Skillsity" platform.
Separately, HDFC ERGO (one of India's largest general insurers, with 200+ branches and 11,000+ employees) used the same kind of role-to-skill mapping across 200+ roles specifically to, in the company's own words, future-proof its workforce.
Retail and pharmacy: onboarding speed at the frontline
Wellness Forever, a pharmacy retail chain with 400+ stores across India, was running onboarding and SOP training the old way: manual, inconsistent, hard to scale past a handful of stores. Moving to mobile-first, AI-recommended microlearning cut onboarding time in half, lifted learner adoption to 92%, and reduced in-store classroom training from five days a month to two.
Banking: proving ROI to a board that wants numbers
Security Bank in the Philippines had bold ambitions for employee development but a legacy LMS that couldn't keep up; reporting was manual, and compliance tracking across 300+ branches and 10,000+ employees was a constant scramble. After integrating its HR competency framework directly into Disprz, the bank saved PHP 3 million and 654 man-days in training costs in a single year, alongside a 93% course completion rate and 80%+ platform adoption.
Real estate: connecting learning to business growth directly
ROSHN, a major Saudi real estate developer, used Disprz's configurable learning paths and dashboards to reach 91% platform adoption, and tied the resulting skilling program to a 15% lift in broader business outcomes; one of the clearer direct lines from "we nurtured a learning culture" to "and the business grew" in Disprz's customer base.
| Company | Industry | What Changed |
|---|---|---|
| Bajaj Allianz | Insurance | 95%+ course completion across 7,000+ employees; Celent Model Insurer Award 2021 |
| Wellness Forever | Retail / Pharmacy | 50% faster onboarding, 92% adoption, 2X less classroom time across 400+ stores |
| Security Bank | Banking | PHP 3M + 654 man-days saved, 93% completion, 80%+ adoption across 10,000+ employees |
| ROSHN | Real Estate | 91% platform adoption tied to a 15% lift in business outcomes |
| HDFC ERGO | Insurance / Financial Services | Skills-first transformation across 200+ roles and 11,000+ employees |
Building It: A Structure Worth Starting With
Most organizations don't need a radically new framework to nurture a learning culture. The 70-20-10 model is still a reasonable place to start: roughly 70% of what an employee learns comes from doing the job itself, 20% from informal interactions with peers and managers, and 10% from formal training.
The mistake most companies make isn't picking the wrong model; it's under-investing in the 10% and assuming the other 90% will take care of itself. If the formal training an employee sits through isn't memorable and genuinely useful, it doesn't just waste that 10%; it also fails to seed the on-the-job learning and informal conversations that are supposed to make up the other 90%.
Quality over quantity in the formal slice is what makes the rest of the model actually work.
A few things tend to separate companies where this structure sticks from ones where it stays a slide in an L&D deck:
- Treat training as infrastructure, not an option. This is the Singapore Airlines lesson; training isn't a lever you pull only when things are calm.
- Build a training plan for every level, not just new hires. Skill decay doesn't stop after onboarding, and neither should the learning plan.
- Load up on just-in-time material for the 70%. Give people something to reach for the moment they get stuck on the job, not three weeks later in a scheduled session.
- Align L&D with where the business is actually headed. A company betting its future on technology capability shouldn't be pouring its L&D budget into frontline soft-skills training alone, and vice versa.
- Make learning visibly matter to careers. Companies that treat demonstrated learning as a real input to promotion decisions get meaningfully more of it, without having to mandate participation.
How Do You Know a Learning Culture Is Actually Taking Hold?
The honest answer is that completion rates alone won't tell you. A workforce can post excellent completion numbers and still not be applying much of what it learned.
The signal worth watching is whether the behavior downstream of training (sales conversations, service quality, error rates, internal promotions) is actually shifting.
| Compliance-Driven Training | A Genuine Learning Culture |
|---|---|
| Training happens once a year, or once at onboarding | Learning is continuous and shows up inside daily work |
| Success = course completion | Success = observed change in on-the-job performance |
| Managers are notified when someone falls behind | Managers actively coach and are recognized for developing people |
| Learning is a cost center L\\&D has to justify each budget cycle | Learning is tied to visible business metrics: sales, retention, service quality |
Where Does Disprz Fit?
The pattern across the industry stories above isn't really about the specific product features: it's that each of these companies stopped treating training as a once-a-year compliance exercise and started treating it as continuous infrastructure, with data connecting learning activity to something the business actually cares about.
Disprz supports that shift through AI-driven personalized learning paths, Turo for turning existing documents into structured microlearning in minutes, and Skydive for connecting formal training to what a manager actually observes on the job. Across the board (3.5 million+ learners, 500+ organisations, 25+ countries), the throughline in the results above is the same: learning that's embedded in daily work outperforms learning that's bolted on as an event.
See what a genuinely embedded learning culture could look like for your teams.Book a demo.
Conclusion
At the end of the day, learning and development is about making employees capable of doing their jobs with ease and competence, and enabling them to go beyond the job description on the page. We're living through a stretch of automation and digital disruption that most people find genuinely hard to keep pace with.
In that environment, a company's ability to help its people learn (and unlearn) becomes directly tied to its own profitability.
Today's businesses run on people more than on machinery. The companies where people are actually trained and equipped to deliver are the ones whose top and bottom lines move in the right direction.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does it mean to nurture a learning culture?
It means treating employee development as continuous and embedded in daily work, rather than a once-a-year training event; supported by manager behavior, career incentives, and a steady flow of just-in-time content employees can use when they actually need it.
Does cutting the L&D budget really hurt the bottom line?
It can, though the effect shows up with a lag. Cutting training saves money immediately, but it also increases the odds of losing employees who don't see a growth path, slows new-hire productivity, and raises the chance of costly on-the-job mistakes that training would otherwise catch.
Is the 70-20-10 learning model still relevant?
Yes, as a starting structure. The model itself hasn't really changed (70% on the job, 20% through people, 10% formal) but most companies underinvest in making that formal 10% genuinely worth an employee's time, which undermines the other 90%.
How do you measure whether a learning culture is actually working?
Move past completion rate. Look at whether behavior downstream of training is shifting: sales win rates, service quality, error rates, internal promotion rates, and whether managers are actively coaching, not just approving time away from work.
What's the actual ROI of investing in a learning culture?
It varies by function, but the data points are large enough to matter: sales training is repeatedly cited at a 353% average ROI, formal sales enablement programs show a 49% vs. 42.5% win rate advantage, and companies with a genuinely strong culture have historically outgrown weaker-culture peers by roughly 4x on revenue, according to Deloitte's analysis of an 11-year performance comparison.
How is AI changing how companies build a learning culture?
Mainly through personalization and speed. AI-driven platforms can turn an existing SOP or product document into a structured microlearning module in minutes, recommend the next piece of content based on a specific employee's role and skill gaps, and surface real-time analytics tying learning activity to performance; all things that used to require a much larger L&D team to do manually.
