The 6 L&D Events Worth Your Time (Online and Offline)
If you’re leading learning in 2025–2026, attending industry events is essential. They consistently bring together thought leaders, deliver new ideas, and provide valuable vendor intel. Besides, you can make new connections that might grow into business wins down the road.
Check out these six online and offline eLearning and L&D events that are definitely worth your attention. Each listing contains a snapshot of the main focus, audiences, and highlights for quicker decision-making.
Why join L&D conferences?
There’s plenty to gain from getting together with fellow L&D pros and industry vendors in one place, even digitally:
- Real-world tactics. The best sessions are case-study heavy and provide great resources for direct application. You’ll come home with slide decks, templates, and experiments to run in your team.
- Peer problem-solving. Roundtables and hallway chats can turn into instant advisory boards. You’ll discuss everything from budget models and AI policies to training ROI.
- Vendor signal over noise. With many product demos, you’ll discover and test platforms quickly and cut months from an RFP.
- Career acceleration. Speaking, writing, or simply being visible in the community opens new collaborations and job leads.
- Focused thinking time. Two or three days away from the inbox is sometimes the only way to think systemically about skills, data, and change beyond your daily responsibilities.
The short list of 6 can’t-miss L&D events
This is a flagship gathering for talent development leaders who need breadth and benchmarking. You can expect thousands of practitioners across industries, including leadership development pros and AI-for-learning experts. The scale means you can see multiple approaches to the same L&D challenge in a single day.
- Where: USA (city rotates; 2025 Washington, DC).
- When: Usually mid-May
- Audience: TD/L&D leaders, HR, enablement, people ops
- Size: 10,000+ attendees; 400+ exhibitors
Best for: Enterprise or fast-growing organizations that want to align L&D with a larger business strategy.
- Learning Technologies (London) — Offline
If you’re based in Europe, this is the region’s go-to event for workplace learning tech and practice, co-located with HR Technologies UK. It’s usually a dense, hands-on exhibition that organizes conference sessions on design, data, content operations, and training implementation.
The expo theatres run nonstop 20-minute talks right beside the stands. You can hear a case study, then quiz the product team that built it. It’s the most efficient way in Europe to pressure-test a new product or approach in a single day.
- Where: ExCeL London (UK)
- When: Usually late April
- Audience: L&D and HR teams, learning technologists, platform owners, vendors
- Size: 11,000+ exhibition visitors; ~1,000 conference delegates; 200+ exhibitors
Best for: Teams modernizing their learning tech stack and content operations.
- DevLearn Conference & Expo (The Learning Guild) — Offline
DevLearn is a maker-centric conference where early adopters compare their ideas on AI, data-driven training, and much, much more. You’ll get a chance to participate in workflows, prototype demos, and community discussions you can turn into pilots as soon as you get home.
What makes DevLearn special is DemoFest — a giant fair where teams show real projects, research data, products, and the lessons they learned. You can also attend Morning Buzz meetups to swap tactics over coffee with people solving your exact L&D problem.
- Where: MGM Grand, Las Vegas (USA)
- When: Typically fall (Nov 12–14, 2025)
- Audience: Instructional designers, learning engineers, platform owners, innovation leads
- Size: 4,000+ attendees; 175+ exhibitors
Best for: Teams piloting new tech/workflows and building data/AI capability.
- iSpring Days — Online
This free online conference is centered on L&D insights and eLearning best practices from forward-thinking experts from all over the globe. Sessions cover AI-powered course creation, structuring ROI-efficient training programs, and adjusting L&D strategies to meet emerging industry challenges. Recordings and resources available after the conference help your team implement ideas faster and retain new knowledge.
What people love about iSpring Days is that sessions play like guided tutorials: they’re highly interactive, full of live discussions, and experts are generous with extra assets and insider tips. The whole event is refreshingly tactical, and it helps you build a great online eLearning community in just two days. You can follow iSpring Days speakers further by joining iSpring webinars. They cover a rich variety of topics, from ID tips to the latest L&D trends and their application.
- Where: Online
- When: Every May (iSpring Days 2025 was held on May 29-30)
- Audience: Corporate L&D practitioners, instructional designers, training managers, LMS admins
- Size: 3000+ live attendees each year
Best for: Lean teams that need hands-on workflows and faster time-to-launch with effective eLearning tools.
- Learning Guild Online Conferences — Online
It’s another two-day virtual event that usually drills into relevant L&D topics, including accessibility, learning data and analytics, and AI workflows. Each edition of the conference features eight 60-minute sessions from practitioners, plus recordings so your team can watch asynchronously.
Single-topic immersion helps teams build coherent solutions and move from strategy to workflow fast.
- Where: Online
- When: Several times a year
- Audience: Instructional designers, learning technologists, L&D managers, analysts
- Size: Attendance varies by topic; typically in the hundreds per event
Best for: Teams that want deep, actionable content on specific eLearning challenges.
You might also be interested in this community-run conference that’s free to attend with all sessions recorded and published. Talks focus on practical skills and workflows for IDs and L&D teams, not sponsor pitches. The event is organized by Tom McDowall, an L&D professional and keynote speaker.
- Where: Online (with occasional in-person “IDTX Unconference” editions)
- When: Dates vary by year
- Audience: Instructional designers, eLearning developers, learning technologists, team leads
- Size: Varies by year; typically hundreds live, with thousands catching recordings
Best for: Practitioners who want accessible upskilling.
Final word
Remember: conferences are worth it only if they bring a real positive change to your business. Pick the training project you need completed or the L&D challenge you need solved this quarter, then choose the event that fits it.
What also helps is deciding on one deliverable to bring back, like a vendor matrix, a 90-day roadmap, or a training improvement plan. This way, you’ll make sure that the event is truly useful.
Anastasia is a marketing writer at iSpring. She follows eLearning trends, explores the best digital learning strategies, and shares her insights on the iSpring Learning Blog.
