From a modest beginning with few staff members and a decentralized budget nine years ago, JLL’s Learning & Development team has grown to 200-plus professionals delivering training in 27 languages to more than 62,000 employees in its Real Estate and Management Services. “JLL’s people-focused strategy reflects our fundamental belief that our employees are our competitive advantage. It is the foundation of our 13 percent year-over-year global growth and is underscored in JLL’s purpose to ‘Shape the future of real estate for a better world,’” says Chris Engel, JLL’s senior director, Learning & Development, Industries. “Our People Promise—empowering employees to shape a brighter way—drives our approach to career growth. By investing in comprehensive training and development, JLL gives our colleagues the knowledge and tools to own their success and ensures that our teams deliver exceptional value to clients, all while building careers that adapt to the commercial real estate industry’s rapid transformation.”
Last year, JLL streamlined its training programs through efficiencies and optimization of service delivery, utilizing centralized and shared resources across business lines, renegotiating contracts, and leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to save employee time, resulting in a 22 percent savings in training budget, according to Engel.
ALIGNING GOALS AND RESULTS
JLL’s senior leadership ensures all training programs directly support key strategic business goals. For 2025, business goals focused on three areas in particular:
Safety performance: The company aimed to drive its safety culture to achieve a 20 percent reduction year-over-year in all categories of injuries and sustain zero serious injuries. The One Team SAFER Together two-hour workshop-style training has significantly improved workplace safety performance, as measured by the Total Recordable Incident Rate (TRIR).
Employee retention: The organization sought to maintain a minimum 85 percent retention rate by developing teams and creating a work environment that drives high job satisfaction and promotes personal development. JLL’s nomination-based leadership development programs for aspiring managers exceeded performance targets, with program graduates achieving an 89.29 percent retention rate—reflecting JLL’s commitment to growing careers and supporting individual definitions of success.
Market share growth: JLL worked to produce a 13 percent year-over-year growth in market share. Its Commercial Academy curriculum contributed to a 12 percent market share growth in second quarter 2025.
By equipping employees with essential business acumen and commercial skills, the program has directly supported revenue growth and competitive positioning in the commercial real estate market. “JLL’s Commercial Academy achieved success through unprecedented direct C-suite executive involvement in both content development and training facilitation,” Engel notes. “Senior leaders were involved in training facilitation, transforming traditional top-down training into collaborative knowledge sharing across business lines.”
JLL L&D CORE TEAM AND KEY STAKEHOLDERS, top, from left: Benjamin Ortiz, Senior Training Manager; Cassi Godfrey, Global Training Director; Iris Vazquez, Training Manager; Ben Cannon, Head of Learning & Development Operations; and Amy Franks, Workplace Experience Manager. Bottom, from left: Luke Whalen, Director, HR Business Intelligence; Christopher Stabile, People Experience Partner, Industries; Alex O’Connor, L&D AMR and REMS; Ruth Gallaugher, Global AME Program Lead; and Odila Vanstraelen, Commercial Excellence Manager.
CUSTOMER SERVICE OBJECTIVES
Engel notes that JLL’s training campaigns often are highlighted in client satisfaction surveys as a key differentiator. JLL’s WE Start, WE Care, and WE Act trained 13,500 learners on six core customer service objectives:
1. Recognizing great customer experience
2. Applying Six Customer Experience Behaviors
3. Using Customer Experience for first impressions
4. Delivering integrated team experiences
5. Viewing complaints as service recovery opportunities
6. Applying the LEARN! Framework (Listen, Empathize, Apologize, React, Notify)
The training program includes:
- A formalized certification process with custom lapel pins
- Culture cards as daily reminders of hospitality principles
- A train-the-trainer certification program
In-person options include half-day or full-day workshops featuring collaboration exercises, role-playing scenarios, and customer-focused behavior practice. Virtual formats include one-hour live sessions and eLearning modules with participant polling, simulations, and gaming activities. A network of 75 certified trainers delivers the training.
“Net Performer Scores were 7 points higher in business units where WE Start, WE Care, WE Act was fully implemented,” Engel says. “The training contributed to JLL winning new clients through superior service reputation, retaining existing clients through exceptional service delivery, and generating referrals that expand market presence.”
TRAINING CHALLENGES
JLL’s biggest training challenges last year were rooted in employee demand for development opportunities and AI adoption and skill building.
“Manager feedback in the 2024 People Survey revealed a desire for more career-growth opportunities and shorter, more interactive learning experiences,” Engel explains.
In response, JLL launched Learning Labs Live and eLearning Labs in 2025. “Learning Labs transformed traditional lengthy leadership programs into flexible, bite-sized learning that delivers immediate practical value while democratizing leadership development across the entire organization,” Engel says. “Dynamic online Webinars provide accessible 45-minute interactive sessions across all time zones, while eLearning Labs deliver 15-minute microlearnings that make leadership development practical, interactive, and accessible to everyone.”
The labs cover six topics: Leading Strategically, Leadership in a Digital World, Sharing Your Leadership Vision, Data-Driven Decision-Making, Challenging Questioning for Leaders, and Future-Ready Leadership.
Part of the development process also included preparing JLL’s workforce for AI integration across the organization. The company developed the AI@JLL Learning Series serving more than 17,500 learners with hands-on training sessions. It includes a month-long virtual competition called the Promptathon. “This hands-on, immersive training challenges participants to design prompts that demonstrate global scalability, business impact, implementation feasibility, and quality design with supporting evidence,” Engel says.
In addition to the Promptathon, the training encompasses foundational AI concepts and advanced AI topics, JLL GPT and Outlook Assistant integration training, role-specific and business unit-specific AI applications, Webinars and eLearning modules, hands-on projects, and tailored learning paths.
Engel says adoption of AI tools is 64 percent for staff who completed AI@JLL training compared to 26 percent for staff who have not completed it. This is an overall adoption improvement of 146.51 percent and has resulted in a 93.75 percent reduction (from 4 hours to 15 minutes) in time to task using JLL’s internal AI platforms.
For L&D, Engel says, generative AI transforms operations with PowerPoint creation from prompts, document translation, and rapid eLearning module development using avatar libraries and AI-generated scripts. JLL also developed proprietary AI platforms, including JLL GPT, Falcon, Azara, Corrigo FM Assistant, and IRIS for training delivery. Now utilized by 41,500 users, JLLGPT was the first large-language model purpose-built for the commercial real estate industry, Engel says. The AI Manager Dashboard enables tracking of team adoption and training progress.
BUILDING FUTURE-READY SKILLS
JLL continues its work to meet industry net-zero emissions goals, requiring all employees to be sustainability champions. To help realize that goal, JLL created its Sustainability University and partnered with the U.S. Green Building Council to achieve the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification for more than 1,600 JLL staff.
JLL also is focusing on future skill building with emerging technologies. This includes honing in on “lateral competencies,” transferable skills that work across any business line, rather than traditional role-specific training, to prepare the workforce for evolving industry demands. JLL’s Future-Ready Skills Assessments addressed this across all business lines, empowering employees to shape their career paths with development opportunities that value what makes each person unique. Staff and their managers were given a skills assessment on specific competencies for their role—for example, communication skills, customer focus, business first, teamwork, and additional skills based on their specific business line role. The result was a spider gap analysis, with staff and their manager discussing the gaps.
WHAT’S NEXT FOR 2026?
In 2026, JLL will continue to prioritize programs supporting fulfillment, development and growth, Engel says. “We plan to scale successful programs such as Commercial Academy and WE Start, WE Care, WE Act across more regions, in multiple languages.”
She adds that JLL is looking at integrating agentic AI with the company’s existing Technical Skills Assessment (TSA) program for more sophisticated gap analysis. “And we aim to improve promotability of technical and trades staff through enhanced augmented and virtual reality training capabilities.”