Technology Skills Development Platforms

What the calendar still calls planned has been published since late May 2025. The Forrester Wave: Technology Skills Development Platforms, Q2 2025 is out. It is the first edition of a category Forrester carved out of a larger skills market, and the carving itself is the most important thing about it.

Forrester drew a line through the middle of corporate learning. On one side of the line sits technology skills, the subject of this Wave: eight vendors, nineteen criteria, scored as an HR-tech purchase. On the other side sits human skills, leadership and communication and collaboration, which Forrester covers separately, in a Landscape rather than a Wave. The split says something blunt about what buyers actually purchase. Technology skills are bought with measurement attached, team assessments, skill analytics, proof of upskilling. Human skills are bought as programs. This article is about the measurable side of the line.

The split that made this category

The division is visible in Forrester's own research calendar.

Fiona Mark's Leadership And Human Skills Development Platforms Landscape handles the people side. The technology side got the full Wave treatment, which is Forrester's strongest instrument. In analyst terms, a market gets a Wave when vendors can be ranked on hard, comparable criteria. The nineteen criteria in this Wave are mostly measurement machinery: individual skills assessment, team skills assessment, skills acquisition analytics, skill benchmarking prior to learning, learning-plan customization, integration with the HR tech ecosystem.

The split also produced neighboring streams, each with its own scorecard. Forrester publishes a Cybersecurity Skills And Training Platforms Wave, most recently announced for Q1 2026. It publishes a Learning Management Systems And Experience Platforms Wave, most recently in Q4 2025, where Cornerstone was named a Leader. The skills market has been sliced into four catalogs: LMS and LXP core, technology skills, cybersecurity skills, and human skills. A buyer who does not know which catalog describes their problem is shopping in the wrong scorecard.

The first edition: The Forrester Wave: Technology Skills Development Platforms, Q2 2025

The new Wave, with vendor announcements landing between late May and late June 2025, evaluates eight vendors across nineteen criteria grouped into current offering, strategy, and customer feedback. Two Leader placements are publicly confirmed, and they do not win the same half of the scorecard.

Coursera was named a Leader with the maximum possible score in eight criteria: partner ecosystem, individual skills assessment, team skills assessment, AI capabilities for skill acquisition, broad tech-domain coverage, skills acquisition analytics, learning-plan customization, and accessibility. It also received a halo for above-average customer feedback. Forrester's recommendation sentence is precise about the fit: organizations seeking "broad tech domain coverage through many customizable learning plans as well as a data-driven approach to continuous upskilling" should consider Coursera. The partner ecosystem claim is concrete: three hundred fifty plus university and industry partners including Stanford, Yale, Google, and Microsoft.

Pluralsight took the highest strategy score of all eight vendors and the maximum possible scores in eleven criteria, including broad tech-domain coverage, hands-on learning, skill benchmarking prior to learning, skills acquisition analytics, integration with the HR tech ecosystem, accessibility, and microlearning and in-content search. It was the only vendor to earn top scores in hands-on learning, skill benchmarking prior to learning, vision, and innovation. Forrester calls it "a well-established technology skills development platform that delivers skilling through its comprehensive expert network," and notes the innovation comes from "applying learning science and customer insights to drive R&D."

Udemy was evaluated for the first time, announcing its inclusion in June 2025 with scale numbers attached: nearly eighty million learners, more than seventeen thousand organizations, over eighty thousand expert creators. Its AI positioning covers an Innovation Studio accelerator, an AI role-play simulation tool, an AI assistant, and AI-powered skills mapping.

The remaining five placements sit with Forrester clients. Two Leaders and a first-time entrant are enough to read the market, because the two Leaders reveal what the criteria actually price.

The measurement inside the training market

The scorecard is not a content contest. It is an accounting exam.

Eight of the nineteen criteria concern assessment, analytics, benchmarking, and HR-system integration, before you reach any content criterion. The category is being bought as a measurement instrument that happens to sell courses. This is why the two Leaders look the way they do. Coursera wins the assessment-and-analytics half, team and individual skill assessment, learning-plan customization, accessibility. Pluralsight wins the hands-on and benchmarking half, labs, pre-learning skill benchmarking, HR tech integration. The buyer's actual fork is not whose courses are better. It is whether the platform must prove skills to the HR system or build skills in a lab.

The sharpest number in the public record of this Wave is a speed claim. Forrester credited Coursera with adding content on new AI tools within forty eight hours. That sentence is the market in miniature. When a category's differentiation is how fast content appears, content itself has been commoditized. Proof got premium: who measured the skill, who benchmarked it, who wrote it into the HR record.

The three neighboring scorecards

This Wave does not stand alone, and the neighborhood is where buyers get lost.

The Cybersecurity Skills And Training Platforms Wave, announced for Q1 2026, covers security-specific skilling with its own criteria and its own field. The Learning Management Systems And Experience Platforms Wave, Q4 2025, covers the broader LMS and LXP market, where Cornerstone leads and the platform categories have, in Forrester's own words, increasingly blurred together. The Leadership And Human Skills Development Platforms Landscape covers the soft-skills side.

A vendor appears in more than one of these. A buyer's problem usually does too. The risk is not picking the wrong vendor from this Wave. It is picking this Wave when the actual problem is cybersecurity skilling, or an LMS replacement, or a leadership program. The catalog you pick decides which scorecard judges you.

What the first scorecard cannot prove

The honest limitation of this category is that it is one edition old.

A first edition has nothing to be measured against but itself. The nineteen criteria are new. No vendor's score on them has survived a second evaluation. The halo system, customer feedback, criteria weights, all of it is first-run machinery. Forrester itself will learn how well the criteria separate vendors only when a second edition exists to check the first against. Until then, the scorecard defines the market more than it ranks it.

Second, the field is only partially public. Two Leaders and one evaluated entrant are confirmed out of eight. The other five placements are gated, which means any shortlist assembled from public announcements is a shortlist of three names in a market of eight.

Third, the category is a slice of a fast-moving whole. The AI content race Forrester scored in 2025, the forty eight hour standard, will look different the moment agentic skilling changes what a skill even is. The scorecard measures a moving object with a first-run ruler.

Three questions before you buy a catalog

One: are you buying content or proof? If the deliverable is courses, half this scorecard is irrelevant to you and you should compare libraries instead of tiers. If the deliverable is measured upskilling that feeds the HR system, the assessment and analytics criteria are the whole game, and the two Leaders' different halves tell you which architecture fits your stack.

Two: which catalog is your problem? Technology skills, cybersecurity skills, human skills, or the LMS and LXP core. Write down what your organization is actually trying to change, then check which of Forrester's four scorecards covers it. A cybersecurity upskilling mandate shopped against this Wave will buy the wrong thing confidently.

Three: how fast does content matter? Forrester's forty eight hour figure is now the benchmark. Ask every shortlisted vendor to show their last three months of content latency on new AI tooling. If they cannot produce the dates, the number was marketing, and the scorecard rewarded something you will not receive.

The HR system this upskilling data ultimately feeds is itself a scored market; see Workday Services, where continuous value has replaced the implementation mindset as the thing providers are now evaluated on.

Forrester does not endorse any vendor named here, and tier placement should not be read as a recommendation to buy.