The Great Resignation has ended, taking with it a series of concerns about employee retention and finding hires with the right skills. However, this does not mean that Learning and Development (L&D) professionals — who were tapped by leadership to solve many of the problems associated with the Big Quit — get to take a break.
Driven by worries about the economy, workers are hunkering down at their current jobs for what’s being called “The Big Stay.” With fewer open roles and fewer applicants, most companies have eased up on finding talent with sought-after skills in the job market.
L&D’s new job? To develop the existing workforce’s skills to keep up with a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
What’s ‘The Big Stay?’
If you’re reading an L&D blog like this one, you probably remember The Great Resignation: the year after the COVID-19 pandemic hit, people started leaving their jobs in droves. Between 2021 and 2023, close to 100 million people left work, citing burnout, changing professional goals, and new job opportunities. This huge reshuffle in the labor market concerned employers, who scrambled to fill open roles and called on L&D to help retain existing employees.
Then, after two years of very high quit rates, resignation rates returned to pre-pandemic rates in 2023… and continued to slow. Now it appears that workers are staying put. Fewer new roles, job satisfaction, and economic uncertainties mean that workers are prioritizing job stability over the potential pay increases that come with jumping to a new position. ADP economist Nela Richardson coined the phrase “The Big Stay” to describe the phenomenon.
It’s great news for the employers who were worried about employee churn. But there’s a new problem: stable workforces risk skill stagnation, especially now, when Generative AI is changing both jobs and technology at a breakneck speed.
What can be done? You’ve probably already guessed: it involves learning.
The skills gap will still be a problem in 2025
No matter the job market, the skills gap continues to be a challenge for organizations, especially when it comes to technology skills. According to research from Robert Half, companies are saving up their budgets to attract talent with certain skills.
But what if candidates with the required skills simply don’t exist? At the moment, companies are particularly desperate for a handful of skills: AI, machine learning, application development, cybersecurity and cloud infrastructure, for example. Some roles may require advanced proficiency with all of those skills, something few candidates have.
“Sometimes these job descriptions are looking for a unicorn,” said Robert Half Senior Regional Director Nicole Sims on the Bytes and Banter podcast. Sims says that companies have been filling in the skills gap by investing in the skills of their current teams — in other words, they are creating their own unicorns.
This is being done in a variety of ways; according to Robert Half’s 2025 Technology Salary Guide, 58% of companies are upskilling their current staff, 52% are reskilling, 47% are implementing mentoring programs, and 47% are paying for professional certifications.
How can L&D address the challenges of the Big Stay?
Learning is a valuable asset, both for employees who are looking to build their skills and for organizations looking to create sought-after skill sets in-house. There are a number of approaches that L&D can take to help both groups make the most of the Big Stay:
1. Skills-based training
There’s evidence that organizations may be moving away from job titles and roles and focusing more on skills, shaping work around the skills and interests of individual workers and freeing team members to take on tasks that might have fallen outside their roles in the past. This also allows organizations to train team members with an interest in or aptitude for AI. However, for this approach to work, an organization has to know who has which skills, as well as which core skills are needed — and only 10% of companies currently have those insights. Training Industry’s 2025 Trends Report listed skills transparency initiatives as a major L&D trend going into the next year.
2. Hiring for potential
One of the ways companies are bridging the skills gap is by hiring candidates with the potential to learn sought-after skills. This is a way of planning for the future. Sims says many companies are packing job ads with technology they don’t have yet, but which they plan to implement in coming years. Candidates who are interested in learning skills on the job, and who demonstrate an ability to be taught have a good chance at landing those jobs, meaning that L&D should plan to create content around leading-edge technology.
3. Grow your own leadership
Another trend listed by Training Industry is leadership training; organizations are struggling to improve leadership pipelines — often because they focus only on current management. Opening leadership training programs to all employees through mentorship programs and coaches, as well as more formal leadership techniques, is a way to build an internal source of leadership — especially when external candidates are scarce.
Remember the human side of the changing workplace
Technology is a big driver in L&D, especially since the rise of GenAI, which is revolutionizing how organizations train and learn. However, it’s important to remember the impact technology changes and the job market have on human beings.
A recent survey of 2,005 workers found that 96% were feeling stress about changes at work, including concerns about AI adoption. Stress has been a constant for workers; for many of those workers participating in the Big Stay, the decision to remain in one job is also a result of anxiety about economic uncertainty.
It’s important for organizations to recognize those stressors and address them. At its core L&D is a human pursuit. Understanding the stresses on your learners can help to shape the programs you design to improve and support them.
