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The Talent Weekly: Strategic Signals for Senior L&D Buyers Investing in Internal Talent Development, Training, and Reskilling
Executive Operating Signals: Bank of America is expanding apprenticeships across technology, operations and banking, moving work-based learning further into its mainstream talent pipeline.
Workforce Structure Shifts: A new AI transformation offer starts by deciding how jobs and workflows should change, making workforce planning and capability-building consequences of work redesign rather than the starting point.
Capability Investment & Vendor Decisions: Verizon is extending AI capability investment beyond its own workforce, combining large-scale skills access with career-transition support for workers leaving the company.
Regulatory & Risk Developments: A new NLRB decision changes how employers assess misconduct that occurs alongside protected workplace activity, putting more weight on whether the same conduct would have triggered discipline outside that context.
1. Executive Operating Signals
Bank of America adds 1,000 apprentices across the business
What Happened
On September 24, Bank of America said it will hire 1,000 additional apprentices over the next two years across Consumer Banking, Technology, Operations and other client-facing functions. The bank already hires more than 800 apprentices annually and paired the expansion with a $150 million, five-year commitment to U.S. workforce-development organizations.
Why It Matters
The scale and functional spread make this more than an early-career hiring announcement. Bank of America is using apprenticeships alongside community-college recruitment and external workforce partners to create additional routes into roles that might otherwise rely on conventional hiring pipelines. For CHROs and CLOs, that shifts part of capability development upstream: instead of hiring against a finished skills profile and developing employees afterward, the organization can shape skills, experience and role readiness as people enter the workforce. As skills-first hiring expands, apprenticeship infrastructure may increasingly sit at the intersection of talent acquisition, workforce planning and employee development rather than belonging to any one function.
Implications for You
Apprenticeships are extending into functions such as technology and operations where employers have traditionally competed through experienced-hire and graduate pipelines, creating another mechanism for building scarce capabilities internally.
Scaling work-based pathways changes when development begins and who owns it, bringing recruiting, L&D and business leaders into the same capability-building process before a worker becomes a conventional employee.
Bank of America is expanding internal apprenticeships while investing $150 million in external workforce organizations, showing how enterprise talent pipelines can span organizational boundaries rather than relying entirely on internal academies.
A larger apprenticeship population also makes manager capacity, structured progression and conversion into permanent roles part of the operating model, not simply program-design considerations.
For Further Reading: Bank of America
2. Workforce Structure Shifts
WTW and Softtek put work redesign ahead of upskilling
What Happened
On September 24, WTW and Softtek announced a partnership combining WTW’s workforce assessment, job redesign, workforce planning, rewards and change capabilities with Softtek’s AI engineering, automation, process redesign, integration and governance services. The joint offer is designed to move organizations from identifying where AI can change work through to implementing the resulting technology and workforce changes.
Why It Matters
The sequencing is notable for CHROs and CLOs. The offer begins with where AI can absorb, augment or reshape work, then moves into job design, workforce requirements and implementation. That makes skills gaps an output of operating-model decisions rather than something organizations can reliably define in advance. For L&D leaders, it also raises the stakes of being connected to workforce planning: capability priorities can change materially once tasks are redistributed between employees, AI and automated processes.
Implications for You
Enterprise AI plans may produce more useful capability requirements when task and workflow changes are defined before broad skills frameworks or training curricula are commissioned.
Job redesign can create different development needs within the same role, making occupation-level skills taxonomies less precise as a basis for workforce investment.
Workforce planning and L&D become more interdependent when AI changes the amount and type of human capacity required, not simply the tools employees use.
Partnerships combining workforce strategy with technical implementation could move more AI-transformation decisions upstream of the CLO, increasing the importance of L&D having visibility into work-design decisions before capability investments are locked in.
Official source: WTW, September 24, 2026
3. Capability Investment & Vendor Decisions
Verizon puts another $50M behind AI capability building
What Happened
On September 23, Verizon launched AI Skills for America with $50 million in new funding, bringing the initiative’s total commitment to $70 million when combined with its existing $20 million Reskilling and Career Transition Fund for departing employees. The initiative will provide free AI training from organizations including IBM, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Coursera and OpenAI, with community partners providing additional coaching and navigation.
Why It Matters
The investment stretches the boundaries of what an enterprise capability strategy can cover. Verizon is funding AI skills for job seekers, early-career professionals, displaced workers, educators and small businesses while retaining a separate transition fund for departing employees. That puts capability-building across the talent lifecycle rather than limiting it to development for current employees. It also shows how a large employer can assemble capability infrastructure from multiple external content and delivery partners instead of building a single internal curriculum or relying on one training provider.
Implications for You
AI capability investment is beginning to span workforce entry, development and transition, creating different measures of success across populations rather than one enterprise-wide training metric.
Large-scale AI programs can increasingly source foundational content externally, shifting more of the internal L&D challenge toward deciding who needs which capabilities, where applied practice sits and how development connects to workforce decisions.
Verizon’s use of technology companies, learning platforms and community organizations shows capability ecosystems becoming more modular, with content, learner support and career navigation potentially owned by different partners.
As foundational AI learning becomes widely available at low or no cost, enterprise spending may migrate toward the layers that make those skills usable in specific jobs and workforce transitions.
For Further Reading: Verizon, September 23, 2026
4. Regulatory & Risk Developments
NLRB changes the test for discipline during protected activity
What Happened
On September 23, the National Labor Relations Board issued its decision in Lion Elastomers LLC, returning to the Wright Line framework for evaluating discipline when employee misconduct occurs in connection with activity protected by the National Labor Relations Act. The decision moves away from separate standards previously used for workplace discussions, social media activity and picket-line conduct.
Why It Matters
The change puts more weight on consistency in how employers apply ordinary conduct rules. When misconduct occurs during protected activity, the analysis can turn on whether the employer would have imposed the same discipline for comparable conduct outside that context. For CHROs and CLOs, that makes frontline judgment an important part of the risk environment: managers need to recognize when workplace disputes may involve protected concerted activity while separating that activity from the conduct they are responding to. Inconsistent escalation, documentation or enforcement across managers can therefore become more consequential even when the underlying workplace rules have not changed.
Implications for You
Manager capability matters most at the point of intervention, where a supervisor may need to distinguish protected workplace activity from conduct that would independently trigger discipline.
Consistency across managers becomes more important because comparable treatment outside protected activity can become relevant to how a disciplinary decision is evaluated.
Employee-relations training may need to focus less on memorizing categories of protected conduct and more on escalation, documentation and applying existing standards consistently across contexts.
The decision increases the value of connecting manager training to actual disciplinary processes, so supervisors know when routine performance or conduct management requires HR or employee-relations involvement.
For Further Reading: National Labor Relations Board, Lion Elastomers LLC, September 23, 2026
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