L&D teams deliver training. Employees complete courses. Completion dashboards show green. Yet when executives ask how learning investments improved customer satisfaction, reduced defects, or accelerated time-to-productivity, most L&D leaders struggle to answer. The business wants to understand impact on performance and outcomes. L&D reports on activity and engagement. This gap between what organizations need to know and what learning platforms can demonstrate isn’t getting smaller, it is the primary reason L&D struggles to secure budget and strategic influence.
I recently sat down with Kallidus‘ leadership team — CEO Harry Chapman-Walker, Chief Product Officer Tony Banks, and Global Sales Director Alex Young — to understand how they’re addressing what they call the “development gap.” The UK-based company has been in business for 25 years, but the last four years have marked an inflection point: 17% growth (nearly double the industry average), 102% net retention, and recognition as the number one corporate LMS in Europe. With 1,300 customers and four million users, they’re now turning their attention to expanding their North American presence beyond their current 10-15% market share.
Why Most Learning Platforms Stop Short of Business Impact
At Brandon Hall Group, we love to recognize and empower impact and excellence in organizations through our Brandon Hall Group™ HCM Excellence Awards®. The corporate learning technology market is crowded with capable platforms, but most share a common limitation: they excel at delivering training while remaining disconnected from what happens after completion. This fragmentation creates gaps that organizations struggle to bridge manually.
Consider the current competitive landscape:
- Workday Learning recently acquired SANA Labs for $1.1 billion to address longstanding limitations in its learning capabilities, which originally centered on video distribution rather than comprehensive learning management. The acquisition signals Workday’s recognition that catching up in learning requires dramatic action, though integration challenges and the platform’s primary focus on ERP functionality mean organizations seeking best-of-breed learning capabilities often look elsewhere.
- Cornerstone OnDemand provides comprehensive talent management alongside learning, offering one of the most feature-rich platforms available for organizations needing enterprise-scale capabilities. The platform’s breadth comes with complexity—many organizations report steep learning curves for administrators and find themselves needing dedicated resources or consultants to fully leverage the system’s extensive configuration options.
- Ceridian Dayforce (formerly Ceridian) acquired eloomi in early 2024 to enhance learning capabilities within its HCM platform, integrating LMS and performance management into Dayforce’s broader talent suite. While this creates a unified employee data model, organizations seeking specialized learning capabilities often find the depth limited compared to pure-play learning platforms focused exclusively on L&D innovation.
Platforms either deliver excellent learning experiences without performance integration, or they offer performance management as a separate module that requires manual coordination. Few natively connect what employees learn to how they develop and ultimately perform.
What Makes Kallidus Different: Learning With a Point
Kallidus built its platform around a premise that should be obvious but remains rare in execution: learning must connect directly to development, which must connect to performance, which must tie to business outcomes. This isn’t philosophical positioning—it’s architectural. The Brandon Hall Group Institute™ membership provides access to research, frameworks, models, tools and learning to help you make this connection.
Unified Learning and Performance Management
Rather than offering performance as a separate module or afterthought, Kallidus integrates learning and performance in a single experience. When an employee completes training, that activity flows directly into development conversations. When managers conduct performance reviews, they can see:
- Skills gaps identified through assessments
- Learning pathways assigned to address those gaps
- Development activities agreed upon with employees
- Progress toward objectives that link to organizational KPIs
This integration means development conversations aren’t abstract discussions—they’re data-informed dialogues grounded in what employees have learned, what skills they’re building, and how that connects to performance expectations.
AI-Powered Skills Management That Actually Gets Adopted
Many organizations struggle with skills frameworks because building and maintaining them requires enormous effort. Kallidus addresses this adoption barrier through practical AI applications:
- AI Taxonomy Generator helps organizations build skills frameworks from scratch or enhance existing ones, getting them 85-90% of the way with minimal manual work
- Automated Skills Tagging analyzes existing course content to suggest relevant skill associations, eliminating the tedious manual mapping that often derails skills initiatives
- Flexible Proficiency Levels that adapt to organizational maturity—from simple “have skill/don’t have skill” approaches to sophisticated multi-level competency models
- Manager-Led Validation that requires employees to request skill level changes and provide evidence, ensuring data quality without creating administrative burden
The system recognizes that skills management fails when it’s too complex to start or too cumbersome to maintain. By removing these barriers, Kallidus enables organizations to actually implement skills-based development rather than just talking about it.
Manager Empowerment as Strategy, Not Feature
Most platforms give managers dashboards and call it enablement. Kallidus treats manager capability as central to their entire development gap strategy. The platform provides:
- Real-time visibility into team learning progress and skill development
- Templates and guidance for conducting effective development conversations
- Ability to assign learning, set development activities, and track progress toward objectives
- Integration of feedback, goals, and development plans in unified views
This focus acknowledges what research consistently shows: managers are the linchpin in translating organizational learning investments into individual and team performance improvements. When managers lack tools and visibility, even excellent learning content fails to drive development outcomes.
Who Benefits Most From This Approach
Kallidus’s integrated platform serves specific organizational profiles particularly well:
High-Consequence Industries Requiring Compliance Excellence
Organizations in healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, and other regulated sectors benefit from Kallidus’s compliance capabilities—automated tracking, certification management, and audit-ready reporting—while simultaneously using the same platform to drive strategic skills development and performance improvement beyond mere regulatory requirements.
Mid-Market Companies (500-5,000 employees) Outgrowing Entry-Level Solutions
Organizations that have mastered basic learning management but struggle to prove business impact find Kallidus provides the sophistication they need without the complexity and cost of enterprise platforms designed for organizations ten times their size.
European and UK Organizations With Global Ambitions
Companies headquartered in Europe benefit from a provider deeply familiar with European compliance requirements, multi-country operations, and data privacy regulations, while gaining capabilities that scale as they expand into North America and other markets.
Learning Leaders Measured on Business Outcomes
L&D teams whose leadership expects them to demonstrate ROI—not just completion rates—need platforms that natively connect learning activities to performance metrics and business KPIs rather than requiring complex external analysis to make these connections.
Organizations Committed to Manager Development
Companies investing in manager capability recognize that even the best learning technology fails without manager engagement. Kallidus’s focus on providing managers practical tools and visibility makes it natural fit for organizations where manager development is strategic priority.
Strategic Perspective: Closing Gaps the Market Creates
The consolidation trend sweeping HR technology creates interesting dynamics. HCM platforms are acquiring learning companies (Workday/SANA, Ceridian/eloomi) to fill gaps in their suites. These acquisitions signal that all-in-one platforms recognize they can’t build learning depth organically — but they also highlight integration challenges that persist for years post-acquisition.
Kallidus occupies valuable territory in this landscape: deep enough in learning and performance to compete with pure-play specialists, integrated enough that they solve the coordination problems that plague multi-vendor stacks, yet focused enough to innovate faster than diversified platforms juggling competing priorities across payroll, benefits, recruiting, and core HR.
Their approach to AI demonstrates this focus. Rather than pursuing AI for marketing purposes, they’ve deployed it to solve specific adoption barriers: making skills frameworks easier to build, automating content-to-skill mapping, and reducing administrative overhead. The AI serves the business problem rather than the other way around.
The roadmap items they shared — enhanced manager dashboards, business outcomes reporting that ties learning to KPIs, quarterly release predictability — all reflect an organization that understands its customers’ real challenges. These aren’t moonshot features; they’re practical capabilities that help L&D leaders have better conversations with their CFOs and business unit leaders about learning’s impact.
For organizations exploring their options, Kallidus warrants serious consideration if you’re ready to move beyond tracking completions and start proving how learning drives performance. The platform assumes you want development conversations, not just content consumption. It assumes managers matter. And it assumes L&D leaders deserve tools that help them demonstrate value rather than just defend activity.
That’s a refreshing set of assumptions in a market still catching up to what buyers actually need.
To learn directly from organizations who are successfully managing this gap, the HCM Excellence Conference® is our annual gathering of thought leaders and innovators that celebrates true excellence in HCM work.
