LearnKey Blog

Why I Brought LearnKey’s LIFT UP Series to Loxis™

LearnKey’s LIFT UP Professional Development Series now runs inside Loxis, so leadership training finally connects to how your people actually work.

A senior leader in conversation with two younger colleagues at a meeting table, illustrating the LIFT UP Professional Development Series now delivered through Loxis

It’s About Time™

Short version: LearnKey’s LIFT UP Professional Development Series is now available through Loxis, the organizational intelligence platform I co-founded with Lori Coruccini and Simon Chatfield. Twelve courses, two tracks, connected to behavioral data about how your people actually work. Here’s why I moved the LIFT UP Professional Development Series there.

You know that feeling when you finish a training course, click “complete,” and go right back to doing your job exactly the way you did it yesterday?

I do. And honestly, I’ve spent a big chunk of my career on the other side of that screen. I’m the CEO of LearnKey. We build training. So it’s a little uncomfortable for me to admit this, but here it is: a lot of corporate training doesn’t change much. Not because the content is bad. Because it’s disconnected.

The course doesn’t know who you are. It doesn’t know what your team is trying to accomplish this quarter. It doesn’t know that you’re brilliant at starting things and kind of terrible at finishing them… or the other way around. It just shows up, gets checked off, and disappears into a completion report.

That’s the problem I wanted to fix. And it’s why I’m genuinely excited to share that LearnKey’s LIFT UP Professional Development Series, which we already deliver as SCORM courses for your own LMS, is now available in one place through Loxis.ai, the organizational intelligence platform I co-founded.

Here’s the belief underneath all of it, and it’s one we share at both companies: people are at the core of every business that works, and culture decides how well those people work together. Training should serve that. Not the other way around.

So what is Loxis, really?

Think about how most companies “see” themselves today. Finance has its dashboards. HR has its employee records. The learning system holds the training. Somebody runs an engagement survey once a year, and the results live in a slide deck nobody opens again.

Each of those is useful. But they don’t talk to each other. It’s like having a doctor, a dentist, and a physical therapist who’ve never once compared notes about the same patient.

Loxis connects them. It’s an AI-driven platform that pulls together four things:

  • Know the Business. What’s actually going on inside the organization, including what employees are telling you.
  • Know the Market. What your competitors and your industry are doing out there.
  • Know the Plan. Your strategy, mapped down to goals, structure, and who’s accountable for what.
  • Know the People. How your folks naturally work, how teams fit together, and where they need to grow.

And once you can see all of that side by side, you start finding gaps. Skills people don’t have yet. That’s exactly where upskilling the people you already have comes in, and that’s where LearnKey fits.

People aren’t interchangeable parts

This is the part I care about most.

Picture two people on the same project. One of them walks into the kickoff meeting already pitching three ideas and has made two new friends by lunch. The other one quietly builds the spreadsheet that keeps the whole thing from falling apart, and actually hits every deadline.

Who’s more valuable? Trick question. You need both. But if you hand the spreadsheet to the idea person and put the spreadsheet person in front of the client… you’ll get frustration from both of them, and probably a worse result.

That’s what behavioral science does for you. It explains how people naturally approach their work: how they communicate, make decisions, handle pressure, and get along with others. Loxis puts those patterns in front of leaders, both for individuals and for whole teams.

Now, I want to be clear about something, because I’ve seen this go wrong. A behavioral profile is not a sorting hat. It doesn’t replace someone’s experience, their qualifications, what they actually want to do, or a good manager’s judgment. It’s one more lens. A pretty powerful one, in my opinion. But a lens, not a verdict.

One more thing belongs right here, because almost nobody accounts for it. Someone can be perfectly qualified for a job and still be running on fumes. You know the type. Great résumé, right skills, and you can just tell they’re dragging. Their camera’s off. Their answers get shorter. Six months later they’re gone, and everybody acts surprised. Knowing how a person is built tells you nothing about how that person is doing. Pay attention to both.

The goal is simple: let people do more of what they’re naturally good at, give them room to grow into the rest, and notice when the tank is empty before it’s an exit interview.

“Nice to have”? The numbers say otherwise

I’ve sat in plenty of budget meetings where training was the first thing on the chopping block. It’s treated like a perk. Free snacks for the brain.

But look at what the research actually says.

Engagement is in rough shape, and it’s expensive. Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace report found only 20% of employees worldwide were engaged at work in 2025. One in five. Gallup estimates the cost of low engagement at roughly $10 trillion in lost productivity, about 9% of global GDP measured against 2024 output. That’s a modeled figure rather than a measured one. It’s also not a rounding error.

And engaged teams perform better. A lot better. In Gallup’s Q12 meta-analysis, business units in the top quartile of engagement, compared with the bottom quartile, showed:

  • 23% higher profitability
  • 18% higher sales productivity, measured by sales
  • 14% higher productivity, measured by production records and evaluations
  • 10% higher customer loyalty and engagement
  • 21% lower turnover in high-turnover organizations, and 51% lower in low-turnover ones

Quick honesty check: those are median differences between business units, and they’re associations, not promises. No platform, ours included, can guarantee you a 23% profit bump. But when the gap is that big and that consistent, you’d be foolish to ignore it.

The skills clock is ticking. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 (WEF) estimates 59 out of every 100 workers will need training by 2030—and that 11 of those 59 probably won’t get it. That’s over 120 million people at medium-term risk of being left behind. Meanwhile, 85% of employers say they plan to prioritize upskilling, and 63% call skills gaps a major barrier to transforming their business.

Now, I’d love to tell you the fastest-growing skills are the human ones. They aren’t. WEF puts AI and big data at the top, followed by cybersecurity and networks, then general technological literacy. Technical skills are climbing faster than anything else.

But look at what employers say they need right now. Resilience, flexibility and agility ranks second on that list, behind only analytical thinking, with 67% of employers naming it. WEF also calls that cluster the clearest dividing line between job roles that are growing and job roles that are shrinking. So the human skills aren’t a consolation prize. They’re the thing that determines whether your people can absorb all that technical change without breaking.

Most companies can’t move their talent fast enough. LinkedIn’s 2026 Talent Velocity Advantage Report puts 86% of companies below its bar for “talent velocity”: knowing what skills they have, building the ones they need, and moving people where they’re needed. The leaders averaged a 28-point edge across four confidence measuers, including holding onto critical talent and lining people up with shifting priorities. Fair warning on that one: it’s LinkedIn’s own yardstick, scored from a survey of talent professionals rating their own organizations, and LinkedIn sells training. I still think the direction is right.

Here’s my takeaway from all of it. You can’t just hire your way out of every change. It’s too slow and too expensive. At some point you have to grow the people you already have. And to do that well, you have to actually know them.

Leading Myself: leadership isn’t a job title

The LIFT UP Professional Development Series has two halves, and I want to start with the one people tend to overlook.

Most leadership training goes to managers. Which makes sense, sort of. But think about the customer service rep who owns a messy problem instead of passing it along. Or the project teammate who keeps everybody calm and informed when things go sideways. Or the person who spots a broken process and just… fixes it.

That’s leadership. None of them have “manager” anywhere in their title.

Leading Myself is built for those people. Every individual contributor in your company. It’s five courses:

  1. My Success Drivers. Understanding your own strengths, stressors, motivators, and values, and how you actually feel about your work. It all starts with self-awareness.
  2. Building Self-Trust and Credibility. Confidence that’s earned, and how your beliefs about yourself shape what you do.
  3. Action Toward Accountability. Owning your stuff. Focusing on solutions instead of blame.
  4. Resilience. Emotional intelligence and practical ways to roll with change instead of getting flattened by it.
  5. Effective Communication and Productive Conversations. Listening, asking better questions, and handling disagreements without wrecking relationships.

Here’s why this matters to me. Culture isn’t something the executive team announces at an all-hands. Creating culture as a leader happens in a thousand small moments: how coworkers talk to each other, how they handle a disagreement, whether they keep their promises. If you only train the managers, you’re only working on a small slice of those moments.

And there’s a bonus. Train your individual contributors well, and you’ve quietly built your next bench of leaders.

Leading Others: because managers make or break it

Okay, now the managers. Because they matter enormously.

Gallup has put it the same way for years: managers account for at least 70% of the variance in engagement scores across business units. Seventy percent. They restated that figure as recently as September 2026. It’s Gallup’s own research rather than independently replicated work, so hold the exact number loosely—but ask anyone who’s worked for a bad manager whether it feels wrong. Your manager is basically the weather system you work inside of. Sunny, stormy, or that weird drizzle that never quite stops.

And yet most managers got promoted because they were good at the job before managing, not because anyone taught them how to manage. That’s like making your best swimmer the lifeguard and never showing them CPR.

Leading Others covers that gap with seven courses for new, experienced, and future managers:

  1. Maintaining Employee Engagement. Reading what each person needs and adjusting how you lead them.
  2. Building Cohesive Teams. Understanding your team’s strengths, stressors, motivators, and values.
  3. Delegating Work Effectively. Handing off work clearly, and using delegation to grow people, not just offload tasks.
  4. Navigating Conflict Effectively. Spotting conflict early and steering it somewhere productive.
  5. Delivering Constructive Feedback. Having the hard conversation in a way that actually helps.
  6. Working and Managing in a Virtual Workplace. Trust, communication, and productivity when your team is a grid of faces on a screen.
  7. Creating an Inclusive Culture. Making sure people feel respected and actually heard.

Pair those with what Loxis shows a leader about how their team fits together, and a manager isn’t guessing anymore. They can see how their team fits together, and they’ve got the tools to do something about it.

What my co-founder Simon says

Simon Chatfield, my fellow Loxis co-founder and the Founder and CEO of OptimumHQ, put it better than I could:

“The greatest opportunity companies have is not simply finding better employees, but better understanding and developing the people they already have. Leadership training is critical, and LearnKey’s Leading Others series helps managers build the skills to lead successful teams. But equally important is investing in individual contributors through the Leading Myself series. Every employee influences culture, productivity, and results. By combining behavioral intelligence with professional development, Loxis helps businesses put the right people on the right goals and gives those people opportunities to grow. When employees succeed, the organization succeeds.”

That first line is the one that sticks with me. Everybody’s chasing the perfect hire. Meanwhile the people who’d thrive with a little understanding and investment are already sitting right there on your payroll.

What this looks like in real life

Let me make this concrete.

Say your company is launching a new product. Sales, marketing, operations, customer service, and tech all have to pull together. The usual way to staff it? Grab whoever’s in the right department and has a free calendar.

That’s how you end up with a launch team that looks great on an org chart and grinds like a rusty gear in practice.

The fix isn’t complicated, but it does take information you probably don’t have in front of you. Before you staff the thing, understand how these particular people work. Who drives things forward. Who catches the details. Who keeps the peace when the schedule slips. Then look honestly at where the gaps are—and that’s where the LIFT UP Professional Development Series plugs in:

  • The manager who keeps doing everything herself? Delegating Work Effectively.
  • The team that keeps talking past each other? Effective Communication and Productive Conversations.
  • The folks getting whiplash from shifting priorities? Resilience, or Action Toward Accountability.

One caution, though. We’re not saying “your profile says X, so take course Y.” That would be lazy. The point is to combine the behavioral insight with what employees tell you, what skills the work actually needs, and what the business is trying to accomplish. Then the training means something, because it’s aimed at real work.

Know Me, Grow Me, Include Me, Inspire Me℠

Culture isn’t your mission statement on the break-room wall. It’s how people actually treat each other on a Tuesday afternoon when a deadline is slipping.

And it pays, at least as far as anyone can measure it. McKinsey research from April 2025 found that companies in the top quartile of organizational health delivered about three times the shareholder returns of those in the bottom quartile. Organizational health, in their terms, is basically how well a company lines up behind a strategy, executes it, and adapts. I’ll add the caveat that this is a correlation drawn from their own survey database, without controls. Healthy companies and successful companies tend to be the same companies, and the arrow plausibly runs both ways.

At Loxis, we boil what employees want down to four simple asks, adopted from a framework used by Know Your Talents:

  • Know Me. Understand my strengths, my style, and what I could become.
  • Grow Me. Invest in my development and my career.
  • Include Me. Notice what I contribute and actually hear my voice.
  • Inspire Me. Connect my work to something that matters.

If you’ve ever been an employee, you already know these are true. LIFT UP lives squarely in Grow Me. Loxis ties that growth back to the other three: your strengths, your team, and the goals that make the work feel worth doing.

We describe the outcome as People-Positive, Productive, and Profitable. I like that it doesn’t pick a side. Employees want meaningful work and a chance to grow. Employers need results. Those two things aren’t enemies. Done right, they feed each other.

Why the three of us built this together

Loxis was founded by three people coming at the same problem from three different directions: Lori Coruccini, founder of Know Your Talents; Simon Chatfield, founder and CEO of OptimumHQ; and me.

  • Know Your Talents brings the behavioral science. Understanding how people tick, how teams gel, and how culture gets built.
  • LearnKey brings decades of building training, from technology education to professional development.
  • OptimumHQ brings the adaptive software that Loxis runs on.

We kept seeing the same thing over and over. Companies treat assessments, training, and strategic planning as three separate chores, run by three different departments, in three different systems. It’s like three people each holding one piece of a map and never laying them down on the same table.

Loxis lays the map down. LIFT UP is the part that helps people actually walk the route.

Questions I get asked a lot

What’s the LearnKey and Loxis partnership, in one sentence?

LearnKey’s LIFT UP Professional Development Series is now available through Loxis, so training connects directly to your people’s strengths, your culture, and your business goals.

Why give leadership training to people who don’t manage anyone?

Because everybody influences culture, productivity, and teamwork. Self-awareness, accountability, resilience, and communication help everyone, title or not.

What’s the difference between Leading Myself and Leading Others?

Leading Myself builds personal effectiveness for employees at every level. Leading Others builds management skills: engagement, delegation, team building, feedback, conflict, and inclusion.

Can this help with retention?

It can give you much better information about how people are doing, what they’re good at, what they need, and whether they’re lined up with the right goals. Whether retention improves depends on what you do with that information. I won’t pretend otherwise.

How do I measure the ROI of upskilling?

Set a baseline, train, then compare. Track engagement, retention, productivity, customer satisfaction, leadership effectiveness, and goal achievement, and keep in mind that training isn’t the only thing moving those numbers.

Start with one team

I’ll leave you with this.

Most companies will happily spend six figures on new software without blinking, then argue for weeks over a training budget. I get it. Technology feels concrete. People feel… fuzzy.

But the software doesn’t execute your strategy. People do. And they do it a whole lot better when somebody has taken the time to understand them, help them grow, and show them how their work connects to something bigger.

It’s about time businesses invested in understanding their people as much as they invest in their technology.

If you want to start small, here’s my suggestion. This week, pick one team. Ask yourself honestly whether you know what each person on it is naturally great at, and where each one is quietly struggling. If you can’t answer that, you’ve just found your starting point.

The LIFT UP Professional Development Series won’t fix a broken culture on its own; no course series will. What it does is give everyone a shared language for self-awareness, accountability, and communication, and give managers something better than instinct. Run it on a platform that already knows how your teams are built, and professional development stops being a completion report.

When you’re ready to go further, explore the LIFT UP Professional Development Series, call 800.865.0165, or email clientservices@learnkey.com about the courses. I’d genuinely love to hear what you find. And if you want to see how the LIFT UP Professional Development Series maps to the people you already have, request a Loxis demo.

— Jeff Coruccini, CEO of LearnKey and Co-Founder of Loxis

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