Continuous Learning & Coaching

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The HR Leader's Edge — Edition #8

Keep Learning. Just Don't Do It Alone.

By Heidi Klotz, Leadership Coach & Fractional VP HR

Published October 7, 2026

When I enrolled in the coaching certification program at Concordia, I had more than 20 years of HR behind me. I'd been a Vice-President. I'd sat in the rooms where the big decisions get made. I assumed I was there to learn a new skill set, and that the rest of me was more or less finished.

Then I had my first session with my mentor coach.

She asked me what I wanted the next ten years of my career to look like. Not what I was planning. What I wanted.

I didn't have an answer. I had a to-do list, a business plan, and plenty of opinions. But nobody had asked me that question in a very long time, including me.

That one conversation did more for my thinking than most of the courses I've taken. It's also why this month's issue is about two things I think belong together: never stopping learning, and not doing it alone.

Your skills have an expiry date

Let's start with the part most of us already know, even if we don't act on it.

According to the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, employers expect 39 percent of workers' core skills to change by 2030. That's roughly four in ten of the things you're good at today, in about five years.

Here's the interesting part. In 2023, that same survey put the number at 44 percent, and the report credits the improvement partly to a growing focus on continuous learning, upskilling and reskilling.

In other words, the learning is working. For the people who are doing it.

The ones who aren't are quietly falling behind, and they usually don't notice until a job posting or a restructuring points it out for them.

Learning doesn't have to be a program

When people hear "continuous learning," they often picture a degree, a certification, or a week away at a leadership course. Those are great. They're also not the only option, and they're not how most growth actually happens.

Most of it happens in small, regular doses. An article that reframes something you thought you understood. A webinar you watch over lunch. A conference where the best idea comes from the person sitting next to you, not the keynote. A book that sits on your nightstand for three months and then suddenly makes sense.

The trick is treating it as part of the job, not something extra you'll get to when things calm down. Things don't calm down. So put it in your calendar. One article a week. One webinar a month. One conference a year. Then write down one thing you'll do differently because of it.

That last step is the one most of us skip. It's also the one that matters.

Information isn't the problem

We've never had more access to learning than we do right now. I'm still a believer in what AI can do here too. You can get a clear summary of almost anything in seconds.

But most people I work with aren't short on information. They're short on clarity. They know a lot about leadership. What they don't know is what they want next, what's genuinely holding them back, or which of the fifteen good ideas they've collected is the one worth acting on.

No article can answer that for you. It takes a conversation.

Coaching isn't a rescue

This is where I want to push back on something I hear all the time.

Somewhere along the way, coaching picked up a reputation as a fix. Something you get when you're struggling, when a review went badly, when HR has quietly decided you need "support." I've watched people lower their voice when they mention they're working with a coach, as if they're confessing to something.

Think about who actually has coaches. Elite athletes. Musicians at the top of their field. CEOs. Nobody assumes an Olympian has a coach because they're failing. They have one because they're serious about getting better.

Organizations increasingly see it the same way. According to the 2025 ICF Global Coaching Study, more than half of coaching clients are now sponsored by their employers. Companies aren't paying for that as damage control. They're paying for it because it works.

What a thought partner actually does

So what do you get from one-to-one coaching that you can't get from a course?

Someone whose only agenda is you. Your manager cares about you, and also about the team's results. HR, as I wrote in August, has more than one loyalty. Your friends and family love you, and have opinions about what you should do. A coach is the rare person in your working life with no stake in the outcome, except that it's the one you actually want.

Space to think out loud. Most of us do our best thinking when we're talking, not when we're staring at a blank page. Saying something out loud to someone who's truly listening is often the moment you realize you don't believe it. Or that you do, more than you thought.

Questions you wouldn't ask yourself. A good coach doesn't hand you answers. They ask the question sitting underneath everything else. Like, what do you actually want?

Clarity on your goals. Not the goals in your performance plan. Yours. What you want next, what you're willing to trade for it, and what the first real step looks like.

Follow-through. All the learning in the world is wasted if nothing changes on Monday. Knowing someone will ask how it went is a surprisingly powerful motivator.

That's the piece that turns learning into growth. Articles, webinars and conferences fill you up with ideas. A coach helps you figure out which ones are yours, and what to do with them.

Keep learning. Just don't do it alone.

I still think about that first session. I walked in believing I was there to learn a skill. I walked out realizing I'd stopped asking myself the most important question in my own career.

I've kept asking it since. Some months the answer is clearer than others. But I no longer try to answer it on my own.

Coaching was never meant for people who are stuck. It's for people who aren't finished.

Heidi Klotz is a Leadership Coach and Fractional VP HR based in Montreal, Quebec. She is a Professional Goal-Centric Certified Coach (Concordia University) and holds the CHRP (Certified Human Resources Professional) and SHRM-SCP (Society for Human Resources Management - Senior Certified Professional) designations. Before founding Heidi Klotz Coaching & Leadership, she spent more than 20 years in senior HR roles at Merck, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Mattel, Ardene and AtkinsRéalis, where she was Vice-President of Total Rewards. She coaches online in English and French.