It pains my prescriptivist instincts to say so, but FWIW I do interpret them differently, frequently as the complementary sides of a single event:

A learning is a successfully learned thing. Or a received lesson.

A lesson is a taught thing. When effective, this would be one path to a learning for the receiver.

I suppose that makes sense. Personally, I would write lessons learned rather than learnings in part to get rid of the red squiggle. My dictionaries flag "learnings" as a typo.

"Lesson" also bears this meaning of something learned, though that would make "learnings" more precise, and therefore distinct.

My experience seems to be that people who use "learnings" are referring to the lessons learned by others, usually subordinates and is used instead of "lesson" because of -- being sensitive to how harsh it sounds to say "group X learned several lessons".

Ugh, seriously. Like utilize instead of use.

In earlier days, I thought it'd be fun to have two versions of my resume. They had parallel content, but one was fluffed up in corporate-speak, and the other was human English.

I included links, e.g. resume-fluffy.html or resume-direct.html, and (somewhat seriously) suggested that hiring managers read the first and tech evaluators the second.

It made for some light humor in discussions with hiring groups. And also some effectively-paralyzed recruiters, which added to the fun of the former.

Learnings can be more easily interpreted as "something I learned', while lessons can come across as 'lessons for you'.

I came here for this comment.

it's almost - almost - as bad as 'vinyls'