As Robert Half’s senior director of global learning experience and delivery, Rebecca Alimorong oversees a 30-person learning and development team that supports the leadership and development needs of both the HR consulting and staffing firm’s own employees and its contingent workers. That’s no small feat.
“It’s a never-ending variety of work,” she said.
As Alimorong’s team works across the entire company, it looks at how different departments are solving L&D challenges and modifies those solutions to address different issues that might be occurring elsewhere. Her team can also spot trends happening with other companies and adapt those to help its workforce.
“I’ve always been interested in that full-organization view. And I know sometimes for learning and development, that’s a little bit harder when you think of all the parameters,” she said, but that comprehensive view can help L&D leaders serve the business as strategic partners.
“I think sometimes in HR, they don’t think of us as the strategy side of the business all the time,” Alimorong said. “Although I tell them, we are manning the workforce, and if that’s not strategy, I don’t know what is.”
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How would you describe your specific job to someone who doesn’t work in HR?
I lead corporate learning strategy for a global company, helping teams and leaders grow by designing smarter, more impactful training programs. I focus on building skills and proficiency across the workforce using a mix of leadership development, AI tools, modern technology platforms, and utilizing data to make innovative modifications to existing learning experiences. In simple terms, I make sure people have what they need to succeed now—and be ready for what’s next.
What’s the best change you’ve made at a place you’ve worked?
One of the biggest shifts I led in our organization was rethinking how we approach global learning and analytics. Instead of just collecting surface-level feedback from training sessions, I championed a more strategic approach—using deeper data insights to really understand what our employees need to grow. This change helped us create more meaningful, personalized learning experiences that actually support career growth and business goals.
What’s the biggest misconception people might have about your job?
What I do is a lot like being a teacher—but in the corporate world, the challenges are bigger. In schools, you often have a set curriculum and a single age group. In L&D, I'm building learning strategies for a global workforce with different roles, cultures, time zones, and skill levels—all while aligning with business goals.
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What’s the most fulfilling aspect of your job?
One of the most fulfilling parts of my role has been identifying and developing employees ready to step into leadership roles—reskilling and upskilling talent to drive mobility, improving performance, and enabling meaningful organizational change by aligning learning strategy with evolving business needs.
What trend in HR are you most optimistic about? Why?
Strengthen the business case for L&D by tying learning activity to talent outcomes.
There are two data points that come with learning. You have the skills that you develop that you could do an assessment and tell right away, “This person knows how to do this, this person knows how to do that.” What we’re looking at now is incorporating interpersonal development. How do you go [to] that next layer to say, “Did it change behavior?”
We taught this, we know that they’ve adopted it, but how are they applying it? So there’s those soft elements, and I’m feeling very optimistic about being able to collect some of that, what you might consider engagement data.
What trend in HR are you least optimistic about? Why?
There’s a risk of confusing activity with impact—tracking clicks and completions instead of true skill development or performance change.
Not being able to tell that next level if there was a change in production, in behavior, in application. So if you don't have that, they’re just going through the learning, just to go through the learning.
I’ll use an example. If everybody just took compliance and didn’t pay attention, we’d have a ton of lawsuits. If everybody just took the OSHA training and didn’t lift boxes properly, we’d have a ton of injuries. When you think about it like that, that’s how I think of, “I’m just clicking through to say I did it. I just want to read enough to get a passing score, or I attended, but I wasn’t present.”