How to Build a Learning and Development Plan for the New Year

Few times are as pressure-filled and hectic as the last few months of the calendar year. For many organizations, the last quarter of the year is the time that department managers put the final touches on internal budgets. Sales leaders are striving to achieve their aggressive sales goals for the year. On the manufacturing floor, supervisors are navigating coverage of shifts with increasing requests for vacations and unexpected sick days. And organizations such as retailers can see up to 80 percent of their total revenue completed in the last few months of the year, with a similar increase in customer service requests and needs.

Those who serve in HR, talent management and training roles in these organizations face challenges comparable to their peers; time is limited and demands are many as the end of the year comes closer. As one training manager pointed out, "Every year we start with the illusion that the pace of things will slow, but why we continue to think that is a mystery. Those last few months are always busier than any other time of the year!" What is worth fitting into an already-full agenda? Any activity that sets up the start of the year for your organization's learning success. This article covers the year-end actions we recommend, then the larger task they feed: building the learning and development plan for the coming year, including what a plan contains, how it differs from a strategy, a one-page template and how to measure it.

What a learning and development plan is

A learning and development plan is the organization's commitment for the year: which capabilities it will build, in which populations, through which methods, on what calendar, with what budget and measured how. It is different from an individual development plan, which belongs to one employee and their manager (our guide to individual development plans covers that), and it is different from a learning and development strategy, which sets direction over several years. The strategy says where L&D is going and why; the plan says what happens this year, who owns it and how you will know it worked. Organizations that have a strategy still need the plan, and organizations without a strategy can still build a good plan by starting from this year's business priorities.

Year-end actions that set up learning success

Here are the actions we suggest when time is short. Some thoughts:

• Use available year-end information as an ad hoc mini needs assessment. Data such as documented progress on KPIs and completed performance appraisals that have been collected over the course of the year can be useful information about existing, performance-influencing needs for development. Even a brief scan of these documents can show patterns that training efforts can affect. Yes, there are more complex ways to determine needs, and simpler ways; our article on training needs assessment methods covers both. But if you are going to be reviewing this data anyway, why not cull development needs in the process?
• Re-publish and remind employees about your organization's development planning tools and guidelines. Often these include development planning forms and references to specific development options that build your organization's defined leadership competencies, core values or role-specific skills. Many people are refreshed and motivated to make changes in the new year. Take advantage of this motivation by putting development plans front and center. Don't have any tools? Our individual development plan guide includes a form and thinking prompts you can use.
• Request ten minutes on the agendas of key managers and use it to invite them and their staff to attend training in the new year. Frequently, calendars of formal development are set well before the new year starts, but enrollment can be slow to take off. A personal invitation, with callouts of programs of most relevance to managers and their teams, can be just the nudge that is needed to ensure attendance rises.

Have more time?

• Prepare for and hold recommendation meetings with department managers. Share information about the closing year's development activities (for example, who attended which programs, what results were achieved, what improvement was seen) and give recommendations for development focus in the new year.
• Conduct some much-needed development with your own HR or training team. Sometimes surprisingly, HR and training groups are often overlooked when it comes to team development. Run a team feedback survey (here is an example team report) and debrief the meaning with the team. Conduct a book review over a lengthened lunchtime. Host a half-day internal conference where everyone brings an item for best-practice sharing around a specific topic that will help you address an issue the department will face in the year. Whatever the method, your own team will benefit from the same attention they provide to other teams.

If your learning plans include distributed teams, factor hybrid blended learning design in early, before formats harden.

How to build the learning and development plan for the year

The year-end actions above produce most of the inputs a plan needs. Here is the sequence we use with clients to turn them into a plan:

1. Start from the business priorities. List what the organization has to achieve in the coming year and the populations whose behavior determines it: a sales force entering new markets, supervisors absorbing a reliability initiative, new managers promoted during growth. Every line in the plan should trace back to one of these.
2. Gather needs from data you already have. KPI progress, appraisals, engagement and exit data, customer complaints and last year's evaluation results usually point to the gaps. Reserve a formal needs assessment for the populations where the gap is unclear or the investment is large.
3. Prioritize to a few capabilities per population. Too much content, stretched over too much time, with little opportunity to apply within the business cadence creates a shallow program that will struggle to get results. Better to focus on three capabilities or skills that drive outcomes. Define each as behaviors people will demonstrate, not topics they will cover.
4. Choose the mix of methods. Formal programs carry the difficult, high-stakes skills that need practice with feedback; experience, peer learning and curated resources carry the rest. Our article on employee development methods describes the four types and when each fits, and existing learning assets should be inventoried before anything new is built.
5. Build the calendar around the business cadence. Program dates that ignore budget season, quarter close, peak season on the floor or the sales cycle are the ones that get cancelled. Put the calendar next to the operating calendar and adjust as needed to not overwhelm participants. Where a population cannot leave the work, our article on providing training when time is limited shows the formats that fit.
6. Budget the effort, not only the spend. Vendor fees and materials are the visible cost; the time of participants, managers and internal trainers is the larger one and the one that gets the plan cancelled mid-year when it was not counted. Our article on the cost of leadership training gives current benchmarks for one part of the plan.
7. Assign owners. Every priority needs a sponsor in the business and an owner in talent development, and the managers of participants need to know what is expected of them before the first cohort.
8. Decide the measures before the first program. Agree what behavior and business results each priority is meant to move and who will collect the evidence; our guide to measuring training effectiveness describes the structure.

Work in phases. Start with the highest-priority population and the capabilities that drive outcomes, with formal skill-building and application within the business, and add populations and support tools in later quarters. A plan that commits to everything in January tends to deliver the easy half of it.

A learning and development plan template

Here is the one-page format we use. One row per priority, and if the plan runs past a page, it is usually trying to do too much:

The example row is drawn from an international sales leadership program we designed for a global mining company, where the behavioral success checklist and the learning metrics were tied to the organization's own measures of "retention of priority accounts" and "percentage of at-risk accounts with action plans." The format works the same way for a supervisor population on a manufacturing floor or for the HR team itself.

Communicating the plan and filling the seats

A plan that exists only in talent development is a calendar. Here are the practices that turn it into something managers act on:

• Recommendation meetings with department managers at year-end, using last year's results and this year's priorities, so that the plan arrives as advice rather than as a schedule.
• Personal invitations from talent development to managers and their teams, naming the programs most relevant to them, which lifts enrollment more than a catalog announcement.
• Manager briefings before each program, covering what will be taught and what to ask about afterward, and a short debrief agenda for the weeks after.
• Reminders in the channels people already use, timed to the cadence: enrollment windows, pre-work, application assignments. Our article on reinforcing training lists the options.
• Where support for learning is low, address the culture alongside the plan; our article on creating a learning culture covers the conditions.

Developing the HR and training team itself

The plan should include a line for the people who deliver it. The team feedback survey above gives a structure: a team assessment rates items on a ten-point scale across areas such as purpose, roles and collaboration, reports the highest- and lowest-rated items and competencies and gives the team specific things to discuss. In the example report, a team rated its roles and expertise highly and its recognition, morale and sense of purpose lowest, which is a common pattern in service functions that support everyone else's development. If using something similar, be sure to debrief the report with the HR team, choose two areas and treat them the way you would treat a client's needs. An internal best-practice conference and time to stay current on industry trends are strong additions to the plan for HR's development.

Examples from our work

Here are three examples of plans built the way this article describes:

• A U.S. defense subcontractor's 40+ HR business partners needed to become internal consultants who could influence senior leaders and reduce contractor attrition. The plan was a nine-month learning journey of three workshops, virtual sessions and self-paced learning, with every event built around real cases tied to the organization's published strategic workforce objectives and a capstone business case presented to a panel of business leaders.
• A global pharmaceutical organization needed foundational digital knowledge across the enterprise. The plan aligned to its digital capability framework: a virtual workshop series developed with a business school partner, a set of digital electives for deeper topics and integration with the organization's own learning platform, reaching nearly 2,000 employees. Our digital upskilling case study has the detail.
• For the global mining company above, the sales leadership plan focused on a small number of behaviors tied to a business outcome, ran within the sales cadence and was measured on the organization's own account metrics. Our guide to planning sales leadership development describes the structure.

Where learning and development plans fall short

Here is what we have learned about the failure points:

• The plan is a catalog of courses rather than a set of business priorities with behaviors attached.
• Needs are assumed rather than read from the data the organization already collects.
• Too many priorities, so the difficult ones lose to the convenient ones by the second quarter.
• The calendar ignores the business cadence and the programs collide with peak periods.
• Only the spend is budgeted, so the effort of participants and managers is discovered mid-year.
• Managers hear about the plan when the invitations arrive.
• Nothing is measured beyond attendance, so next year's plan starts from the same guesses.

Frequently asked questions

What is a learning and development plan?

The organization's plan for the year: the capabilities it will build, the populations it will build them in, the methods, the calendar, the budget and effort, the owners and the measures. It sits between the multi-year learning and development strategy and the individual development plans employees write with their managers.

What is the difference between a learning and development plan and an L&D strategy?

The strategy sets direction over several years: which capabilities matter to the business, how learning is delivered and governed and what the function is for. The plan is the year's commitments under that direction. A strategy without a plan stays a statement of intent; a plan without a strategy still works if it starts from this year's business priorities.

What should a learning and development plan include?

For each priority: the business result it serves, the population, the behaviors, the methods, the timing, the owner and sponsor, the budget and effort and the measures. The one-page template above holds all eight.

How do you align a learning and development plan with business goals?

Start the plan from the goals rather than from requests for training, name the population whose behavior determines each goal, define the behaviors and tie the measures to the metrics the business already tracks. The mining example above tied learning measures to account retention, which kept the program focused and made the results clear to the sponsor.

What is a typical L&D budget?

Training magazine's 2025 industry report put average spending at $874 per learner in the United States, higher in small companies and lower in large ones, with employees receiving about 40 hours of training a year [1]. Treat the figure as a reference point; the plan's budget follows from the priorities, and the time of participants and managers is usually the larger cost.

When should the annual plan be built?

In the last quarter, alongside budgets, using the year-end data described above, so that the calendar is set and the invitations are out before the new year starts. Revisit it after each quarter and adjust as business priorities move.

Where to start

If the year-end has already arrived, document business outcomes, gather existing data on a few key roles and prioritize development for those roles from a mix of self-paced and group development. Later, build the plan in January from what you surface. PPS International Limited partners with HR, learning and development and talent development teams to build annual plans, from needs assessment and priority setting to program design, delivery and measurement; learn more about our talent development consulting, or contact us to talk through next year's plan.

References

1. Training magazine, 2025 Training Industry Report, November 2025. https://trainingmag.com/2025-training-industry-report/