When you look at Rehanna Saeed’s career, one thing stands out immediately: she’s stayed.
British Gas launched her L&D journey; TP has shaped it for the last 14 years. In a profession where three years in a role can feel like a long time, that kind of tenure gives her a rare longitudinal view of how L&D has shifted from ‘training’ to workforce intelligence.
Today, Rehanna is one of two Global L&D Directors at TP, reporting into a VP of L&D and ultimately the Chief People Officer. Her remit is clear and self-created: lead the organisation’s move to a skills-based model and make sure skills sit at the centre of how the business thinks about people, not at the fringe.
“We need to have skills at the centre of what we do – not on the side, not a fringe thing.”
Three years ago, returning from maternity leave, Rehanna realised the traditional way of handling skills had reached its limits. TP had been doing what many of us do: building manual skills taxonomies, mapping catalogues to roles, and constructing curricula around role-based skill sets. It was diligent work, but she saw that it was no longer sustainable or sufficiently dynamic.
While she was away, she kept a close eye on technology trends and labour market dynamics. Coming back into the business, she decided to push for something more ambitious: a core skills taxonomy covering functional roles across a 500,000-strong workforce, plus a future-focused skills set aligned to where the business wanted to go.
She secured investment to work with Mercer on a base, static taxonomy, but even as that was being built, she was already challenging the limitations of static design.
“This is great, but it’s going to go out of date the moment it’s produced… this will need constant refresh; this isn’t something I’ll be able to handle manually and keep up to date for a company of 500,000.”
The skills project has become a multi-year transformation: first securing buy-in and building the taxonomy, then connecting it to job architecture and labour market data and now investing in the technology to operationalise skills and link them to recruitment, development, performance, and mobility. By mid-2026, Rehanna had sign-off from the CFO for the technology investment she needs and was heading into a meeting with the new CEO to secure final approval. It’s not a short-term initiative; it’s a bet on skills as the backbone of workforce transformation.
Rehanna is very clear that traditional L&D metrics no longer define success. TP has moved away from counting completions and learning hours as primary indicators. She still watches unique users on the LMS or LXP as a signal of adoption, but that’s only one piece.
The real measures she cares about are business metrics: attrition, especially of high-potential talent; speed to hire and speed to competence; and wasted training time and its impact on revenue.
TP is large, global, and “lean” by design. This makes it especially important to ensure L&D is helping shape effective performance, capability and workforce decisions, not simply delivering learning events
“The ability to have a great, structured performance review process that is fair and transparent… means that people have clarity on expectations, can build the right skills and have the support to perform at their best.”
She links this directly to talent retention, particularly for high-potential employees. During periods of transformation, clear expectations, fair and transparent performance decisions, and visible investment in skills can help build confidence and encourage people to stay.
She’s also unapologetically commercial in how she presents L&D cases. Her investment narrative is simple and powerful: show what’s happening now, show what happens if you do nothing, and show what she recommends with conservative but credible numbers.
“People would laugh at me if I said I was going to directly financially impact any improvement… but as an enabler, absolutely… even if I just say 0.5, 0.1 of a business of our size, that’s still a lot of money.”
If the investment is in the millions, she positions it as a drop in the ocean relative to the cost base and then shows how even minimal improvements in attrition or speed to competence would more than pay for itself.
When asked how her role has changed over 14 years and progression into senior posts, Rehanna doesn’t talk about job titles first. She talks about commerciality.
“The connection with the business… has been my biggest development… it’s really commercialised what I do, how I talk about things, what I choose to highlight and present.”
Key shifts she highlights include a deeper understanding of what TP needs to be successful, insight into what matters to regional presidents and the CEO, and a sharper, more selective approach to what information she surfaces and when.
Because she’s stayed in one organisation for so long, many of her peers from early in her career have also risen through the ranks. That creates a powerful network: former counterparts are now fellow global directors, multi-year relationships mean shared context and trust, and she and others can act as “two strong voices across two different departments speaking the same story” when change is needed.
She emphasises a mindset that many L&D leaders will recognise but not always practise under pressure.
“We aren’t saving lives… it’s allowed me to present very matter-of-factly to people of whatever level… whoever they are, whatever power they hold… because I know I’ve done my research.”
That confidence – grounded in preparation rather than bravado – has become central to how she secures support from CFOs, CEOs, and other senior stakeholders.
Rehanna’s view on AI is pragmatic and hopeful. At a personal level, she uses AI extensively for research, vendor analysis, and complex comparison work across LXP and skills solutions. This isn’t generic prompting; she describes “intricate prompting” to analyse what vendors really do and where functionality claims don’t match reality.
From a learning perspective, she sees AI as a force multiplier for personalised, skills-led development. Her ambition is to connect self-declared skills, assessed skills, career aspirations, and organisational skill demands, then map adjacent skills that underpin internal mobility and match individuals to tailored content, not generic programmes, at speed and scale.
“If AI can connect the skills that people have got, the career aspiration they’ve mentioned, the skills that that aspirational role has, the skills we need as a business… and then your catalogue of learning can be connected too… automatically that can be pushed, and that takes mountains of work away from a team like ours.”
She is clear that “content graveyards” are no longer acceptable. At scale, thousands of courses quickly become generic clutter. COVID accelerated the shift away from classroom to long e-learning libraries; now she wants a “Netflix feel” where people can dip in and out of content that is exactly right for their level and context.
Her new CEO’s framing of AI has also helped shift the organisational narrative.
“He’s really started to communicate it as: AI isn’t for efficiency; AI is for opportunity.”
Within her team, that has encouraged a more optimistic adoption curve. Basic prompting fluency is now widespread. People use AI to produce more compelling artefacts – like interactive HTML prototypes instead of slide decks – and engage operational colleagues faster. The next evolution will be how traditional content developers work alongside AI-driven content creation in the future LXP and skills ecosystem.
If she were building an L&D function again from scratch, Rehanna wouldn’t place it neatly in one box. Her experience of being “battered between” operational and HR reporting lines has convinced her that a blended model can be more powerful.
For a business of TP’s size and type, her ideal setup would be a portion of L&D operationally managed, fast-tracked decisions, reduced bureaucracy, and clear accountability for impact on frontline performance and customer outcomes, with the rest embedded within a Chief People Officer-led HR ecosystem.
In that model, L&D becomes a core part of the people system:
She’s clear that skills must remain anchored in L&D, not be absorbed as a purely HR initiative. L&D operationalises skills, it doesn’t just catalogue them. Skills drive curricula, mobility pathways, and transformation decisions. Without L&D at the centre, skills risk becoming an administrative exercise rather than a lever for change.
Looking ahead, she believes the biggest things L&D can do for business are reskilling and upskilling at scale, enabling talent mobility through skills adjacency, and acting as “workforce intelligence”, combining structural understanding and capability insight to recommend organisational changes.
“We’re no longer just ‘this person’s come in and needs this three-week training’… we don’t need you to tell us what you need because we can see. We’re going to have the power; we can tell you what’s needed.”
Across her story, several practical lessons emerge for L&D leaders who want more commercial impact:
Attach L&D to real business metrics: attrition, speed to competence and high-potential retention, not just completions.
Use conservative, credible ROI assumptions so you build trust and let results surprise on the upside.
Frame AI as opportunity, not threat, and use it to accelerate analysis, personalisation, and stakeholder engagement.
Anchor skills in L&D but integrate across HR and operations so you influence the full people lifecycle.
Lean into long-term relationships and organisational memory as strategic assets, not just personal history.
Maintain perspective: you’re not saving lives, so be calm, prepared, and direct when you speak the language of the boardroom.
This is the work of L&D as workforce intelligence and it’s the space Rehanna is determined to keep pushing into.
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