How to make learning and development stick: 5 lessons from Amazon’s Gary Cooper
A practical roadmap for communicators who want their teams to see the benefits of their L&D and stay engaged.
Learning and development programs are no longer optional. They’re a necessary tool for organizations to drive retention, performance and trust. The trouble is that these programs too often fall short of their potential. They’re treated as a compliance box and not an iterative, adaptive, personalized experience.
Ragan’s 2025 Salary & Workplace Culture Survey illuminates this disconnect. While 90% of communicators say they have access to professional development, only 40% are satisfied or very satisfied with what’s offered. That’s down from 49% in 2024. This trend may explain disengaged employees and potential turnover: nearly 70% of dissatisfied employees said they were considering a job change.
So what can you do to make learning stick?
Gary Cooper, Alexa Trust and Privacy Marketing Lead at Amazon, joined me for a virtual fireside to share his insights on what these numbers mean in practice, offering a practical roadmap for communicators who want their teams to see the benefits of their L&D efforts and stay engaged.
Here’s what stuck out.
- Leaders must go beyond just providing access to make development personal.
Our survey shows most communicators have access to online training (54%), internal classes (50%), and industry conferences or workshops (53%). But mentoring (27%) and leadership coaching remain the exception, not the rule. Satisfaction is suffering as a result.
“Too many programs throw content at employees without asking whether it helps them do their job better,” said Cooper. “We need to be clear that the content ladders to business objectives and makes a difference in the role someone’s in right now. We have a bunch of content, but we’re not always clear if it actually matters to the person taking it.”
Gary’s words are a reminder that L&D must go beyond simply providing access. It’s on managers and leaders to personalize that access by providing training that lives at the intersection of the person’s role, growth goals and the wider needs of the business. To that end, personalization is now table stakes.
- Learning should be adaptive, not prescribed, and structured for autonomy.
Rather than delivering a fixed curriculum, Cooper shared how Amazon’s CoLab framework (Community, Learning, Analyzing, Building) was built around iterative learning and analysis. It starts with understanding the cultural and linguistic nuances of the workplace, then evolves based on those insights to address strategic needs.
“We want people to make high-value decisions, not just follow a checklist,” Cooper explained. “That’s why we designed our approach to be adaptive—what we call ‘freedom within a framework.’”
Instead of trying to control outcomes, Amazon’s L&D structure empowers employees to choose how they engage within clear, aligned guardrails.
- Design for equity and inclusion at every level of learning.
In the survey, early career communicators reported the lowest satisfaction with development and the highest intent to leave.
Cooper’s solution? Bring language equity into the DNA of development itself.
“We started CoLab by asking: Who’s being left out because of the way we use language?” said Cooper. “If your documentation or training is built for a narrow set of communicators, you’re already limiting access to growth.”
To address this, Amazon partnered with sociolinguists and internal teams to build content that reflected the lived realities of diverse employees, including ESL speakers. That cultural intentionality can (and should) be scaled to the needs of any organization.
- Share accountability between employees and managers around how the performance review is used.
Many organizations still frame career growth as the employee’s responsibility alone. But without manager support and sponsorship, even the best learning resources fall flat. That may explain why only 8% of communicators in the survey found their performance review “very useful” for career development.
“Your people can’t develop if no one’s coaching them,” said Cooper. “You can’t call yourself a leader if you’re not helping the folks on your team grow.”
Cooper emphasized the need for structural ownership: clarity around who guides development, who monitors progress and how those behaviors are supported within performance frameworks.
- Measure progress, then close the loop
Too often, L&D measurement only tracks satisfaction surveys or platform logins. But Cooper’s approach focuses on long-term, role-specific change.
“We start with a baseline assessment before training, then ask: ‘What are the two or three ways you’ll apply this?’” he explained. “Then we follow up three or six months later to see if they’ve actually done it.”
This model combines qualitative impact and behavioral accountability. But I’s also crucial because it reinforces feedback loops.
“If you collect feedback but don’t act on it, you’ve broken trust,” continued Cooper. “And trust is what makes learning stick.”
Want help building a measurable, strategic L&D program that drives retention and real performance? Explore the new modules and courses in Ragan Training, a learning portal built for communicators who want to lead.
