Leadership development is increasingly moving away from classroom training and toward work-based learning, where employees are expected to apply new skills to real operational problems. ScentAir’s ELEVATE Academy is an example of that shift. The company says the 12-month global leadership program has received five Gold Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards, with its first cohort producing measurable savings and improvements in leadership confidence and cross-functional collaboration.
ScentAir’s ELEVATE Academy Puts Leadership Training to Work
Corporate leadership programs often struggle with a familiar problem: employees complete training, but the connection between what they learned and what the business actually changes can be difficult to measure.
ScentAir is taking a different approach.
The scent-marketing company says its ELEVATE Academy has received five Gold awards in the 2026 Brandon Hall Group HCM Excellence Awards, the highest recognition in each category in which it entered. The awards cover leadership development, learning outcomes, measurement of leadership impact, video-based learning and blended learning. Two awards were received in partnership with Big Think+.
The more interesting development, however, is the architecture of the program rather than the awards themselves.
ScentAir designed ELEVATE as a CEO-sponsored, 12-month leadership system for emerging leaders. Instead of treating development as a sequence of courses, the program combines assessments, self-paced video learning, peer discussion, leadership coaching and business projects.
Its central mechanism is a connection between the company’s annual Innovation Contest and cross-functional Capstone initiatives.
Employees’ ideas can become projects that are developed by ELEVATE participants across regions and functions. Participants build business cases, test proposed solutions and ultimately present recommendations to senior leadership.
That turns leadership development into a workforce-management mechanism: employees learn leadership skills while simultaneously working on problems that matter to the organization.
ScentAir says the first ELEVATE cohort produced more than $250,000 in savings through one Capstone initiative. In surveys, 91% of leaders said participants demonstrated stronger leadership capabilities than at the start of the program, while 96% of participants reported greater confidence leading through change and uncertainty. Another 88% reported improved cross-functional communication.
Those figures are company-reported results, but they illustrate an increasingly important direction for HR technology and learning-and-development teams: measuring development programs through business outcomes rather than participation rates alone.
From LMS Content to Applied Learning
Traditional corporate learning management systems have largely been designed around content distribution: assign a course, track completion and record certifications.
That model remains useful for compliance and foundational training, but leadership development is harder to reduce to completion metrics.
A manager can finish a six-hour leadership course without necessarily becoming better at managing ambiguity, influencing peers or making strategic decisions.
ELEVATE’s design attempts to close that gap by creating a progression from learning to application.
The program combines five elements: assessment and insight; self-paced Big Think+ lessons; monthly Leadership Circles; strategic Capstone projects; and reflection with executive visibility.
Video is therefore only one component of the experience.
ScentAir partnered with Big Think+ for two of its five recognized categories: Best Use of Video for Learning and Best Use of a Blended Learning Program. Expert-led video content provides participants with perspectives that are then discussed in facilitated sessions and applied to business challenges.
That distinction matters as enterprise learning platforms become more sophisticated.
Companies such as Microsoft, LinkedIn, Cornerstone, Workday and SAP increasingly operate in a market where learning is connected to skills, talent management and workforce planning. Generative AI is adding another layer, enabling more personalized learning recommendations, content generation and skills analysis.
But technology alone does not solve the transfer problem.
The harder question is whether employees use what they learn.
ELEVATE’s Capstone model effectively creates an application layer around learning content. Participants have to use their leadership capabilities to solve problems, collaborate across organizational boundaries and defend their recommendations to senior executives.
For HR leaders, that can make learning impact easier to observe.
Why This Matters for Enterprise HR Teams
The rise of skills-based workforce strategies is pushing HR departments to rethink how they develop internal talent.
Rather than treating learning and development as an isolated function, organizations increasingly want connections between learning, career mobility, leadership pipelines and business performance.
That is particularly important when external hiring becomes expensive or when companies need specialized capabilities that are difficult to recruit at scale.
A strong internal leadership program can provide a mechanism for identifying employees who can operate beyond their current roles. It can also expose participants to senior leaders and cross-functional projects that would otherwise be difficult to access.
ScentAir’s approach also gives employees a direct route from idea generation to execution.
The Innovation Contest supplies ideas. ELEVATE supplies participants and structure. Capstone projects provide a mechanism for testing those ideas. Executive presentations create an accountability point.
The result resembles a small internal innovation pipeline embedded inside a leadership-development program.
That model is relevant beyond ScentAir.
As organizations deploy AI and automate more routine work, leadership capabilities such as judgment, collaboration, change management and strategic decision-making become more important. HR teams need ways to develop those capabilities without separating learning from day-to-day business operations.
The Brandon Hall recognition is external validation for ScentAir’s model, but the broader takeaway is about measurement.
The most useful learning platforms may increasingly be those that can answer not only who completed training, but also what changed because employees applied it.
That is a significantly more demanding standard—and one that could reshape the enterprise learning market.
Market Landscape
The corporate learning market is moving toward skills-based development, blended learning, employee experience and measurable business impact.
Learning management systems are increasingly being connected to talent-management, performance-management and workforce-planning platforms. The goal is to create a continuous employee-development ecosystem rather than a standalone training catalog.
Three trends are particularly relevant:
Learning in the flow of work: Employees increasingly learn through projects, coaching, collaboration and digital content rather than classroom instruction alone.
Skills intelligence: HR platforms are attempting to map employee capabilities against current and future business requirements, supporting internal mobility and workforce planning.
Outcome measurement: Enterprise buyers increasingly want evidence that learning programs affect productivity, retention, leadership readiness or financial performance.
The competitive landscape includes learning and talent platforms from Workday, SAP, Cornerstone, Oracle and Microsoft, alongside specialist providers such as Big Think+.
Generative AI is also changing the category. AI can recommend content, summarize learning material, create simulations and help employees identify skill gaps. But the ScentAir example highlights an important limitation: technology can facilitate learning, while organizational design determines whether that learning gets applied.
For HR technology buyers, the emerging question is therefore less about choosing between video, courses or live sessions and more about how those components connect to actual work.
Top Insights
- ScentAir’s ELEVATE Academy won five Gold awards, showing how leadership development increasingly combines video learning, peer collaboration, executive visibility and real business projects.
- One Capstone project generated more than $250,000 in savings, illustrating why enterprise L&D teams increasingly measure programs through business outcomes rather than course completion.
- Blended learning is becoming more applied, with Big Think+ video content feeding discussions, reflection and practical leadership challenges rather than operating as standalone training.
- Cross-functional projects create leadership opportunities, giving emerging leaders practical experience while allowing companies to test employee ideas against real operational priorities.
- HR technology is shifting toward skills and outcomes, connecting learning, talent management and workforce planning as enterprises seek stronger internal leadership pipelines.
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