The Problem Isn't a Lack of Content.
It's a Lack of Proof.

Most organizations already have training programs, content libraries, and a budget line for L&D. What they don't have is a practical way to know whether skills are actually building — and a credible way to show it.

That's the gap Macmillan Learning and Ignis AI’s joint solution is designed to close.

Six Principles from Decades of Learning Science — Applied to How Organizations Build Durable Skills

Access the free article below to explore what these six principles mean for how you design, run, and measure development programs.

Start with the outcome, not the activity

Define what capability looks like before designing the path to it.

Check for understanding while you can still act on it

Formative signals tell you where growth is stalling — before it's too late to adjust.

Scaffold the stretch

The productive learning zone is between too easy and too hard. Most programs miss it entirely.

Make practice intentional

Exposure doesn't build skill. Structured, repeatable practice does.

Design the conditions, not just the content

Psychological safety and protected time aren't soft features — they're structural requirements.

Build in reflection

People develop faster when they can see their own progress and adjust their approach.

Get the Article

A Focused 90-Day Pilot.
One Priority Skill.
Before-and-After Evidence You Can Show Leadership.

Macmillan Learning and Ignis AI are inviting a small number of organizations to participate in a structured 90-day durable skills pilot — starting with baseline assessment, moving through guided practice, and tracking progress at 30-, 60-, and 90-day milestones. It's a closed-loop system: assessment, development, validation, and proof — in one structured 90-day experience. If your team is thinking about more practical ways to build and measure employee capability, we'd love to share more.

We're opening a limited number of founding partner spots for 2026 pilot launches. Fill out the form to raise your hand, and we'll follow up within two weeks of the conference.

Sign Up

Why This Perspective is Different

Macmillan Learning brings decades of applied learning science from one of the most instructionally rigorous environments that exists: higher education. Ignis AI brings assessment design and progress measurement that makes skill growth visible and actionable. Together, the work addresses both sides of the challenge: how capability actually develops, and how organizations can see that it's happening.

This is the first and only solution to combine evidence-based development and validated measurement into a single, closed-loop experience.

Instructor helping a student in a computer lab
Article

Six Principles from Decades of Learning Science Applied to How Organizations Build Durable Skills

Learn how decades of educational research and practice can be translated into actionable takeaways for L&D leaders, managers, and talent teams building durable skill development programs.

Get the Article
A diverse group of three students smiling
Opportunity

Explore Early Access

Interested in piloting a more evidence-based approach to durable skills development?

Express Interest

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

    • Durable skills — communication, critical thinking, collaboration, decision-making, and adaptability — are capabilities that develop over time, transfer across roles and contexts, and hold their value regardless of how technology or job requirements shift. Unlike technical skills tied to specific tools or tasks, durable skills show up in behavior and judgment rather than in knowledge tests. That's what makes them harder to build: they require structured practice, real-world application, and feedback over time, not a single training event or course completion.

    • Most organizations measure training by participation — who attended, who completed, what was delivered. But participation data doesn't tell you whether capability changed. Proving skill development requires evidence collected during and after the learning process: diagnostic signals that show where growth is happening, milestone-based check-ins that track progress over time, and observable behavior change on the job. Most corporate L&D programs weren't designed to generate that kind of evidence, which is why the gap between investment and proof is so persistent.

    • Corporate training often fails to produce lasting behavior change because most programs are designed to deliver information rather than build skill. Completing a course or attending a workshop exposes employees to content — but without structured practice, timely feedback, and repeated opportunities to apply learning in real situations, behavior rarely changes consistently. This gap between learning and on-the-job performance is known as the transfer problem, and it's one of the most studied and least-solved challenges in workforce development.

    • The structured pilot Macmillan Learning and Ignis AI are exploring starts with a baseline assessment that gives both employees and employers a clear picture of current strengths and growth areas. From there, employees move through guided practice designed to build specific durable skills, with milestone check-ins at 30, 60, and 90 days. 

      Those milestones serve two purposes: 

      1. They keep employees engaged by making progress visible
      2. They give organizations the kind of longitudinal evidence they need to see whether development is actually happening, not just whether content was consumed.

    • This work is designed for L&D leaders, talent development professionals, HR and people operations leaders, and workforce strategy teams responsible for building and demonstrating employee capability. It is particularly relevant for organizations supporting manager development, leadership pipelines, or roles where communication, adaptability, and critical thinking directly affect performance — and where existing programs generate activity without making growth easy to see or measure.

    • Learning science is the study of how people actually develop capability over time, not just how they absorb information. Decades of research in educational settings has produced well-established principles: defining outcomes before designing content, checking for understanding before moving forward, scaffolding challenges to the learner's current edge, making practice intentional and repeatable, and building reflection into the development process. These principles are foundational in teacher preparation and instructional design. Applying them to corporate L&D program design — rather than treating them as academic theory — is the core of what Macmillan Learning brings to this work.