This month’s spotlight is with Helen Routledge, CEO of Totem Learning.
In terms of how I got into L&D, I actually fell into L&D through a slightly unusual route. I grew up in the 80s loving games, but I was studying psychology at university and became fascinated by the relationship between games, memory, and behaviour. At one point I wanted to research whether games could influence dreams and how that affected long-term memory consolidation. I was genuinely considering getting people to play Tetris for hours just to see when it started appearing in their dreams.
My focus was always on one core question: how do experiences become embedded in long-term memory?
During university, I met a couple of people who had developed a serious game and wanted someone to evaluate whether it actually worked from a learning perspective. I designed a study for them and helped validate the approach. That experience completely opened up the world of learning and development for me.
Ironically, my mentor advised me not to pursue the dream research because it probably wouldn’t lead to a stable career. Instead, I ended up discovering an industry where I could combine psychology, creativity, technology, and behavioural science in a way that felt hugely meaningful.
I started my career heavily focused on research, understanding why games work, when they work, and how different forms of simulation and interaction influence learning outcomes. That curiosity has never really left me.
It’s now been my entire career, and I still genuinely love the industry because it sits at the intersection of human behaviour, performance, creativity, and real-world impact.
The thing I love most about the Learning and Development industry is the potential impact. Good learning changes confidence, behaviour, and sometimes even lives. We’ve worked on projects involving safety-critical environments, mental health, neurodiversity, customer experience, and leadership conversations. When learning is designed well, it can genuinely change how people think and act under pressure.
I also love that L&D sits at the intersection of psychology, business, technology, and human performance. It’s one of the few industries where you can blend creativity with measurable organisational impact.
For anyone who is new to the Industry, I would say spend less time obsessing over content and more time understanding behaviour.
A lot of people entering L&D focus on tools, platforms, or information delivery, but the real question is: what do you need people to actually do differently afterwards?
Talk to learners. Observe the real environment. Understand the pressures people are under. Learn basic psychology and behavioural science. And don’t be afraid to challenge outdated approaches just because “that’s how training has always been done”.
Also, build commercial awareness. The strongest L&D professionals understand business problems, not just learning theory.
One of the biggest challenges over the next 12 months will be separating genuine value from hype, particularly around AI.
There’s an explosion of tools promising transformation, but a lot of organisations are still struggling with the fundamentals: behaviour change, engagement, measurement, and proving impact. I think many teams risk becoming distracted by novelty rather than focusing on whether people are actually becoming more capable.
Another challenge is pressure on budgets and resources. L&D teams are increasingly being asked to deliver more strategic impact with smaller teams and tighter budgets, which means the expectation to prove ROI is only going to increase.
That being said, AI-powered practice and personalised learning are incredibly exciting opportunities, not because AI replaces learning professionals, but because it can create scalable rehearsal opportunities that were previously impossible.
For years we’ve known that practice is essential for skill development, but organisations struggled to provide realistic, repeatable practice environments at scale. AI is starting to unlock that.
I also think there’s a major opportunity for L&D to move closer to operational performance. The industry has spent years measuring completions and satisfaction scores, but the future is about measurable capability, confidence, decision-making, and real-world outcomes.
I discovered the LN through the wider learning and development community. What stood out to me was the focus on meaningful industry conversations rather than just trends or product promotion. It feels like a space where people genuinely care about improving learning, sharing ideas, and challenging the status quo, which naturally aligns with how we approach things at Totem.