What is a Learning and Development (L&D) Plan?
Successful training outcomes start with an L&D plan outlining the relationship between learning initiatives and business priorities. Having an L&D plan in place ensures training is proactive, rather than reactive, in achieving strategic alignment, which is the single most important process capability of great training organizations.
3 Steps to Create an L&D Plan
Follow these steps to create an effective L&D plan for your training organization:
- Assess Business Needs: Creating an L&D plan starts with understanding your company’s strategic priorities: What goals is it hoping to achieve? Which of these goals are high-priority? What challenges is it currently facing? Understanding business needs enables you to create an L&D plan that address them.
- Prioritize: Focus your L&D plan on high-priority business goals that can be addressed given your training organization’s current resources, such as budget and process capabilities. Prioritizing training initiatives associated with key business goals will reinforce L&D’s value to the business and help you gain buy-in from stakeholders.
- Make the Connection: After assessing business needs and identifying the ones that are both high-priority and can be addressed given your training organization’s current resources, clearly show the relationship between each training initiative and the business priority it supports to ensure strategic alignment.
An effective L&D plan will help your training organization identify, design and deliver training solutions that achieve lasting business impact.
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