Learning and Development Trends: Insights from 22 Years

Doug Hawkins - Yzly Founder

I’ve spent 22 years working in Learning and Development. Along the way I’ve led learning agendas for businesses that ranged from 15 people in a government contact centre to giant retailers with 115,000 team members. I’ve worked with intact teams in a single office and with businesses spread across continents. I’ve worked with entrepreneurs taking bold first steps, and with ASX Top 10 and NYSE Top 100 companies where the scale is vast and the stakes are high.

Before that, and alongside it, I spent more than 35 years in leadership across industries as varied as telecommunications, consulting, oil and gas, retail, television production, utilities, hospitality, education, logistics and real estate. The contexts and challenges have been different, but the human patterns are unmistakable.

Over time, I developed a skill that is both professional and personal: the ability to see the truth of people in their actions rather than their words. Behaviour always tells the story. I’ve learned to recognise both noble motives and darker manoeuvres, and to see how the smallest habits can shape not only performance but also wellbeing.

This clarity is sharpened by my own life experience. I live with chronic pain. Five out of six days, it is severe, and because of it, I’ve been in and out of hospital more than once. Pain brings with it the fog and cloud of mental illness. Yet even in those hardest stretches, I’ve found ways to survive, coming out the other side to thrive. I work in bursts, I recover in waves, and slowly I keep improving. Pain has been my harshest teacher, but also one of the most honest.

What I’ve learned through this is simple: small changes matter. Tiny improvements, practiced consistently, can transform lives. And I know I have the skills to help others find that path.

The problem is, business doesn’t always focus on everyone. Too often, the best learning programs are reserved for the elite—the rising leaders, the already prominent, the people who know how to manage up. Those at the margins, the people who most need the tools, are often overlooked. Not from malice, but from budgets, blind spots, and the politics of attention. When leaders are always looking up, they miss what’s happening at ground level.

That’s why I started Yzly.

Yzly is about democratising learning. It is about levering learning and development trends and using my Insights from 22 years in L&D to give everyone, not just executives or high-flyers, the tools of growth, resilience and capability. We build small, evidence-based learning bites that are practical, accessible and cost-effective. They are not so time-intensive that they raise barriers, but not so lightweight that they fail to make a difference.

Because learning belongs to all of us. And when we close the gap between those who have access and those who don’t, we don’t just build better workers. We build stronger, more resilient humans.

That’s the heart of Yzly. Small steps. Shared widely. For everyone.