Training Magazine
The Trade Magazine of Corporate Learning Since 1964
Training Magazine is a professional development publication for the people responsible for teaching employees to do their jobs better: corporate trainers, learning and development specialists, human resources professionals, and business managers who regard workforce development as a management tool. Published by Lakewood Media Group and based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, it has described itself for decades as the source of industry insights, best practices, and case studies for learning professionals — a position it traces to 1964.
The magazine's premise is that employer-sponsored training is a serious business function deserving the same reporting, benchmarking, and scrutiny as finance or operations. Its pages therefore mix learning science and instructional design with budgets, metrics, technology procurement, and executive strategy. Few publications serve that exact intersection, which is why Training became the reference point for the corporate training industry's self-understanding — and why its rankings and conferences are treated as industry institutions.
Six Decades of Publication
Training dates its history to 1964, making it more than sixty years old. It emerged as corporate training was becoming a distinct profession, separate from personnel administration on one side and school-based education on the other. Postwar corporations were building training departments, and the people staffing them needed a literature of their own: how to analyze performance problems, design instruction, deliver it at scale, and prove that it changed results.
Across the following decades the magazine chronicled every major shift in the field: programmed instruction and early computer-based training, the quality and empowerment movements, e-learning and the learning management system, mobile and social learning, virtual instructor-led delivery during the pandemic era, and now artificial intelligence in content creation, coaching, and skills analysis. Publisher descriptions marking its fiftieth anniversary in 2014 and its sixtieth in the mid-2020s underline the continuity: the delivery technology changed completely, while the magazine's questions — what should people learn, how will we know it worked, and what is it worth — did not.
Publisher: Lakewood Media Group
Training is published by Lakewood Media Group, a Minneapolis-based specialist in the learning and development market. The publisher's model combines the magazine with conferences, expositions, awards programs, and digital products — a business-to-business media portfolio built around a single professional community. The magazine is the editorial flagship; the events and rankings are its live and data-driven extensions, and each feeds the others with speakers, case studies, research, and audience.
This integrated structure is characteristic of successful trade publishing. The Training Magazine Network, the publisher's online professional community launched in 2008, grew to a reported 141,000 members, giving the magazine a year-round digital audience between issues and events. Editorial leadership and contributors are drawn heavily from practice: chief learning officers, consultants, university professors of workplace learning, and the master trainers whose names recur as columnists and conference faculty across many years.
Editorial Focus and Regular Departments
Editorially, Training covers leadership development, talent management, coaching and mentoring, training technology, onboarding, evaluation and metrics, and employee engagement and recognition. Its stated departments over recent years give a map of the territory: how-to guidance for trainers, news and statistics in Training Today, best-practice deep dives including cross-cultural and diversity training and global leadership coaching, opinion and analysis in Soapbox, and practical columns on productivity, recognition, and trainer craft from long-running contributors.
Feature journalism in Training leans on case studies from named companies. Rather than reporting learning theory in the abstract, the magazine shows how a retailer redesigned onboarding, how a hospital system measured a leadership program, or how a manufacturer moved compliance training online — with costs, timelines, and measured outcomes where companies will share them. That evidence-oriented style matches its readership: learning leaders must defend budgets to finance executives, and the magazine equips them with peer examples and benchmark data to do it.
The Training Top Rankings and APEX Awards
The magazine's best-known franchise is its annual ranking of organizations for excellence in employee training and development — long known as the Training Top 125, later the Top 100, and in recent years presented as the Training APEX Awards. Organizations apply with detailed accounts of their training investment, program scope, and linkage to business goals; applications are scored quantitatively by an outside research firm and qualitatively by Training editors together with representatives of previous top-ranked organizations and a hall of fame of repeat winners.
The rankings matter beyond ceremony. They constitute one of the few public benchmarks of how much leading employers invest in development and what they expect in return, and the published profiles of top organizations are read as a catalogue of current best practice. Winners have spanned every sector — banks, hospitals, manufacturers, technology firms, government agencies, restaurant and retail chains — demonstrating the magazine's claim that systematic training is a universal management discipline. A Top 10 Hall of Fame recognizes organizations that sustained top-ten performance over multiple years.
Conferences: Training Conference and TechLearn
Training's live events are the other pillar of its influence. The annual Training Conference and Expo, running for decades and traditionally held in late winter, brings together trainers, designers, and learning executives for keynotes, hands-on sessions, and an exposition of learning technology and services. Its companion event, TechLearn, focuses specifically on learning technology — platforms, authoring, virtual delivery, analytics, and now AI — reflecting the field's steady digitization.
For the magazine, the conferences are both community ritual and reporting opportunity. Sessions surface the case studies and controversies that fill later issues; award winners are profiled; and the publisher's editorial calendar has long been planned around bonus distribution at its own and partner events. In a profession whose members are often a department of one inside their companies, the gatherings also perform the social function of a trade association — a place where learning professionals meet their peers and measure their own programs against the field.
Audience and Industry Role
The magazine is written for training, human resources, and business management professionals in all industries who advocate training and workforce development as a business tool. That includes chief learning officers and vice presidents of talent at large employers, training managers at mid-sized firms, instructional designers, facilitators, and the consultants and technology vendors who serve them. Readership descriptions consistently emphasize decision-makers: the people who choose platforms, hire providers, and set learning strategy.
Within the wider HR media landscape, Training occupies the specialist depth position. General HR publications cover learning as one topic among many; Training covers nothing else, and can therefore assume professional fluency and pursue metrics, design models, and technology in detail. That focus made it a natural home for the field's internal debates — return on investment versus broader value measures, classroom versus digital delivery, build versus buy — conducted by the practitioners who would have to live with the answers.
Digital Presence and Community
Training's digital home, trainingmag.com, carries current articles, rankings announcements, award results, and archives, while the Training Magazine Network extends the brand into a membership community with webinars, resources, and peer exchange. The publisher also presents annual Network Choice Awards, in which community members vote for preferred providers across categories such as learning platforms, content, measurement and assessment, and leadership development — turning the audience itself into a source of market intelligence.
Digital delivery suits the subject. A readership that teaches others online expects its own professional reading, networking, and conference experience to work online too, and the pandemic-era normalization of virtual training only deepened that fit. Print issues continue to anchor major editorial moments — above all the annual rankings — while the website and network carry the continuous conversation between them.
Significance in Workplace Learning
Training Magazine's significance is that it helped define corporate training as a profession with standards, benchmarks, and a memory. By reporting the field continuously since 1964, ranking its leading practitioners, and convening its community in person and online, it gave learning professionals an identity larger than their individual employers — and gave employers a way to judge what good looks like.
From Minneapolis, Lakewood Media Group's magazine remains the trade title of record for a function that economic change keeps making more important: reskilling workers as technology and markets shift. Its longevity rests on a durable insight its founders grasped in 1964 — that organizations will always need to teach, and that the people who do the teaching need a publication of their own.
