Learning and Development Manager

For me it comes down to three things: relevance, measurement, and reach. Relevance means every programme traces back to a real business need, whether that's a skills gap surfaced in performance reviews or a strategic priority like a new product launch. Measurement means we agree on success criteria before we build anything, using something like Kirkpatrick's four levels so we track reaction, learning, behaviour change, and business impact, not just attendance. Reach means the function serves everyone, not just staff who can attend a Tuesday workshop at headquarters, which is why I favour blended delivery: live sessions, self-paced LMS modules, and manager-led reinforcement. In my last role we cut generic compliance-style training by a third and redirected that budget into role-specific coaching, and completion on the remaining courses rose because the LMS stopped feeling like background noise. Success also means having a seat at the table when the business plans restructuring, not just when someone wants a workshop.

I start with data before I start with content. I pull performance review themes, exit interview notes, and manager feedback to spot patterns, then run short structured interviews with a sample of the target audience and their managers to understand the gap between current and desired performance. I'm careful to separate a genuine skills gap from a process or tooling problem; if people know what to do but the system stops them doing it, no amount of training fixes that. Once I've got a shortlist of causes, I weigh them against business priority and effort to build, similar to how a product manager might use RICE, so I'm not just building whatever was requested loudest. For a recent leadership programme I ran a 20-person survey plus five manager interviews before writing a single slide, and that changed the brief significantly: the original request was for a communication skills course, but the real gap was delegation, so we built a different programme entirely.

I treat it like any other internal pitch: I bring a business case, not a training catalogue. That means tying the ask to a metric leadership already cares about, whether that's time to productivity for new hires, retention in a high-turnover team, or a capability gap blocking a strategic goal. I usually bring a small pilot with a clear before-and-after measure rather than asking for a full annual budget upfront; it's far easier to get sign-off on a six-week pilot with twenty participants than a company-wide rollout with no proof point. I also involve finance or the relevant business unit lead early so the numbers are credible when I present them. When I pitched a new manager onboarding programme, I framed it around a 15 percent gap in first-year manager retention compared with tenured managers, ran a pilot with two departments, and used the resulting engagement scores to secure funding for a company-wide rollout the following year.

My rule of thumb is to build the core once and localise the edges. Things like onboarding fundamentals, compliance, and core leadership skills work well as a central curriculum because the underlying content doesn't change much by function; sales and engineering both need managers who can give feedback well. What changes is the context and examples, so I build a shared skeleton and then work with business unit leads to swap in relevant scenarios, terminology, and case studies. This also means I don't rebuild everything from scratch for every department, which keeps the team's capacity manageable. Where I make an exception is technical or highly regulated teams, where the content itself needs a subject matter expert's input; I bring in a senior engineer or compliance lead as a co-designer rather than trying to write that material myself. The result is a curriculum that feels tailored to each audience without the L&D team building ten versions of the same course.

I launched a management fundamentals course a few years ago with strong content, but completion sat under 30 percent three months in. My first instinct was to blame the content, but when I actually talked to managers who hadn't started it, the real issue was timing and framing: it launched during a quarter when the business was under heavy delivery pressure, and it had been positioned as optional professional development rather than something tied to their day-to-day problems. I paused new promotion of the course, ran five interviews with non-starters, and relaunched it three months later with two changes: I renamed modules around the specific problems managers had raised, like 'having the underperformance conversation' instead of generic titles like 'performance management', and I got each manager's own manager to nominate them and check in, rather than leaving it as a self-service link in an email. Completion rose to around 70 percent within the new cohort. The lesson was that adoption problems are rarely a content problem first; they're usually a timing, framing, or accountability problem.

A first-time manager came to me because a long-tenured team member was pushing back on every piece of feedback, and the rest of the team had started to disengage. My job was to help her build the confidence to handle it herself, not to step in and fix the relationship for her. We worked through it over three sessions: first, I had her describe specific incidents rather than characterising the person as 'difficult', which surfaced a pattern of missed deadlines she hadn't actually documented. Then we role-played the conversation she'd been avoiding, with me playing the pushback so she could practise staying calm and specific instead of getting defensive. Finally, we agreed a follow-up plan with written expectations and a two-week check-in, and I asked her to debrief with me afterwards. It didn't resolve instantly; the team member stayed resistant for a few more weeks, but the manager felt far more in control, and by the following quarter the team member's performance had measurably improved. I try not to solve these problems directly: managers need the muscle memory more than they need me to intervene.

When I inherited the L&D function at a previous company, there was no dedicated leadership programme and no budget approved for one that year. Rather than waiting for a bigger budget cycle, I built a cohort-based programme using internal senior leaders as facilitators instead of external trainers, which cost almost nothing beyond their time and a small stipend for materials. I structured it around action learning: each cohort of eight worked on a real business problem over ten weeks, with monthly sessions led by a different internal executive on a relevant topic, peer coaching pairs in between, and a final presentation to senior leadership. It also had a side benefit I hadn't fully planned for: giving our senior leaders visible development opportunities as facilitators. The first cohort's participant satisfaction score came back at 4.6 out of 5, and I used that data plus a handful of participant testimonials to get a proper budget approved for a second cohort with an external component the following year.

I've administered Cornerstone OnDemand and Docebo directly, and worked alongside Workday Learning when it sat inside a broader HRIS rollout. For build versus buy, I look at three things: how core the content is to our specific business versus generic (a company history module should be custom, a project management fundamentals course usually shouldn't), how often it needs updating, and whether we have the instructional design capacity in-house to maintain it well. Off-the-shelf libraries like LinkedIn Learning or Go1 fit generic skills that don't need our brand's voice, and I integrate those into the LMS via SCORM or xAPI so completion data flows into one reporting view. I reserve internal build time for anything tied to our proprietary systems, our specific leadership philosophy, or content that needs frequent updates, like a new product's sales pitch. On a recent project I cut external content spend by around 20 percent by auditing which licensed courses had under 10 percent completion and either replacing or dropping them.

I use Kirkpatrick's four levels as the backbone: reaction, learning, behaviour, and results. Reaction is the easiest to collect and least useful alone, a post-session survey score, but a consistently low score still flags a delivery problem early. Learning is measured through a pre and post assessment or a skills demonstration, depending on the content. Behaviour is where most programmes fall short, because it means checking weeks later, through manager observation, 360 feedback, or usage data, whether people are doing things differently on the job. Results is hardest to isolate, since many factors affect a business metric, but I tie programmes to a metric I can plausibly attribute, like time to first sale for a new hire onboarding course, or manager attrition for a leadership programme, comparing against a control group or a prior cohort rather than claiming credit for every improvement. For a recent sales onboarding redesign, ramp time to first closed deal dropped from eleven weeks to eight, measured against the previous six months of hires.

I start by mapping which parts of the content really need live interaction and which don't. Knowledge transfer, like policy detail or a new tool's features, works fine as self-paced eLearning on the LMS, ideally under 20 minutes per module so people actually finish it. Skill practice, like giving difficult feedback or negotiating, needs live practice with a facilitator or peer, in person or over video, because people need to try it and get corrected in the moment. For a distributed workforce I also build in asynchronous discussion, using a tool like Slack or a cohort channel, so people in other time zones aren't locked out. Spacing matters too: I typically stagger a programme over four to six weeks rather than a single day, with short reinforcement nudges from managers in between, because a one-off session has a steep forgetting curve. For a recent global leadership programme spanning five time zones, we ran three live cohort sessions recorded for those who couldn't attend, paired with self-paced modules and peer coaching, and completion held above 85 percent across regions.