8 Influential L&D Leaders in the USA Worth Following

Workplace learning in the USA is having an awkward moment. The tools have never been better and the patience for training that does not change anything has never been shorter. As of July 2026, the people worth listening to are the ones who talk about what actually moved, not about what was delivered.

This is a short list on purpose. Eight people, each with something specific you can go and read, listen to or argue with. Not a scoreboard, and not sorted by follower count. The useful question is whether someone's public work helps you answer a real question in your own organisation.

1. Josh Bersin

Founder and CEO, The Josh Bersin Company

Bersin has spent decades reading the corporate learning market and saying plainly what he sees in it, which is rarer than it sounds in an industry that runs on optimism. His next book, Superpowered, written with Kathi Enderes, is due in October 2026 and looks at what AI genuinely changes for employees, teams and leaders. His earlier book, Irresistible, is still a good argument for treating employee experience as a design problem rather than a survey result.

Follow him for the market view: what large employers are buying, what they are quietly walking away from, and which claims about learning technology are holding up under contact with reality.

2. Brandon Carson

Chief Learning Officer, Docebo

Carson founded L&D Cares, a nonprofit that gives learning professionals free coaching, mentoring and resources. That is a rare thing in a field where most of the help is for sale. He is also the author of two ATD Press books, L&D's Playbook for the Digital Age and Learning in the Age of Immediacy, both of which are more concerned with operating models than with course design.

Follow him for the operator's view of learning at scale, and for a consistent argument that L&D earns its seat by solving business problems rather than by producing content.

3. Kimo Kippen

Co-founder, Shape The Future Consortium

CLO Magazine named Kippen Chief Learning Officer of the Year in 2015, during his time as chief learning officer at Hilton, and he has chaired the board of the Association for Talent Development. He co-founded the Shape The Future Consortium with Nigel Paine, and he runs the Learning and Development Executives Councils at The Conference Board.

Follow him for the convening view. He spends his time in rooms full of senior learning leaders, which means he knows which questions keep coming back around the table and which ones quietly got solved.

4. Trish Uhl

Founder and Principal Consultant, Owl's Ledge

Uhl wrote the generative AI chapter in the second edition of ATD's Handbook for Measuring and Evaluating Training, published by ATD Press in 2025. She works at the join between learning, data and AI product development, and she is unusually specific about method at a time when most people are still being specific about excitement.

Follow her if your question is how to tell whether a learning effort did anything at all, or what actually changes when AI tools enter the workflow rather than the pitch deck.

5. Cara North

Founder, The Learning Camel

North wrote Learning Experience Design Essentials for ATD Press, and co-founded the Instructional ReDesign podcast with Joseph Suarez. Her work sits close to the craft: scoping a project honestly, working with subject matter experts without being flattened by them, and shipping something people can use.

Follow her for practical learning experience design, particularly if you are the person who has to build the thing rather than approve it.

6. Joshua A. Luna

Writer and leadership development practitioner

Luna wrote The Toxic Effects of Branding Your Workplace a "Family" for Harvard Business Review in 2021. It is a precise argument about how family language at work quietly moves the line on what an employer can ask of someone, and it has aged well. He writes and builds manager training on the same theme.

Follow him for manager development that takes the psychological contract seriously, and for a sharper vocabulary about culture than most of what circulates.

7. Randy Matusky

Founder, Tomiko Consulting

Matusky is a graduate of the Georgetown University Leadership Coaching Program and holds the ATD Certified Professional in Talent Development credential, alongside SPHR, PMP and Prosci change practitioner certifications. That combination is the point. He runs Tomiko Consulting and leads organisational learning work at Miltenyi Biotec, which means he is doing the coaching, the change and the learning in the same week.

Follow him for the coaching side of L&D, and for what the work looks like when development, change and capability are not treated as three separate departments.

8. Sean McAlister

Chief Learning Officer, U.S. Department of Commerce

McAlister leads professional development for more than 48,000 employees across 12 bureaus in 120 countries. George Mason University named him a distinguished alumnus in 2025. Scale like that changes the nature of the problem: the binding constraints are budget, policy and geography rather than appetite.

Follow him for public sector learning at genuine size, and for what it takes to make development real for people who are nowhere near headquarters.

How to use a list like this

Pick two, not eight. Choose the ones closest to the problem in front of you right now, and give them a month of real attention rather than a follow and a scroll.

Then do something with it. Save the ideas that make a specific claim, pick one, and test it small: a clear audience, a clear behaviour you expect to change, and a way of knowing whether it did. Strong learning work links capability to the task people actually have to do. It makes room for practice, feedback and support inside the flow of work, rather than treating attendance as the result.

If capability rather than content is your real problem, 20 powerful tips for closing the skills gap on your team is a more practical starting point than any reading list. And if you want the wider people-function view, 50 essential HR thought leaders to follow covers the territory next door.

Frequently asked questions

Who is this list for?

Anyone responsible for capability in a US organisation: heads of L&D, HR business partners, instructional designers, and the executives who keep asking why training did not stick.

Why only eight people?

Because eight people you will actually read beats fifty you will not. A shorter list makes it likelier that one of them changes something for you.

What is the best way to follow someone like this?

Read the long thing, not the short thing. The book, the chapter, the podcast episode. Posts tell you what someone is thinking about. The longer work tells you what they actually think.

Final thoughts

Treat this as a starting map rather than a syllabus. The ideas that matter are the ones that survive contact with your own people, your own budget and your own week.

About the author

Jonno White is a Brisbane-based leadership consultant, keynote speaker and Certified Working Genius Facilitator. He works with corporates, nonprofits and schools around the world, helping leaders build organisations people would move cities to work at.