The HR Generalist Guide to L&D – Building Bridges, Not Just Buying Courses
Chapter 10 of The HR Generalist's Blueprint
Most companies treat Learning & Development like a cafeteria. They lay out a menu of random courses and hope employees pick something healthy off it. This approach fails because it ignores business strategy entirely. If your company plans to launch an AI product next year and your engineering team only knows basic coding, it genuinely does not matter how many time management workshops you run. You'll still miss the target.
Your job here is shifting L&D from "employee benefit" to business necessity, closing the gap between where the company currently is and where it actually needs to be in twelve months.
The Skills Gap Analysis
Before buying a single subscription to a learning platform, you need an honest inventory of what your people can currently do.
A skills gap analysis really just answers two questions in sequence: what can our people do right now, and what will they need to be able to do twelve months from now to hit the goals the business has set. A simple three-level matrix does most of the work, rating each employee on each critical skill as a 1, meaning they need supervision to perform the task, a 2, meaning they can do it independently, or a 3, meaning they can actually teach it to someone else.
Watch for the red flag pattern here. If your Project Management column is full of 1s with no 3s anywhere, that's a critical gap, not a minor one. If the one senior person who could teach it leaves, the department genuinely collapses, and that's exactly where your training budget should be going first.
The 70-20-10 Split
The biggest mistake in L&D is equating learning with classroom time. Research consistently shows adults forget roughly half of what they learn in a classroom within an hour unless they apply it almost immediately, which makes pure classroom training a fairly weak investment on its own.
The 70-20-10 model is the ratio I keep coming back to. Seventy percent should be experiential, learning by doing, where the struggle genuinely is the lesson, things like leading a new project, managing a summer intern, or fixing a broken process through direct stretch assignments. Twenty percent should be social, learning from watching what good actually looks like, through peer mentoring, shadowing a senior leader, or honest feedback sessions. Only the remaining ten percent needs to be formal, structured education through workshops, online courses, or conferences, useful as a foundation but never as the whole plan.
A question worth asking every manager who requests a training budget: what's the 70% assignment that goes with this course? If they don't have an answer, the budget probably shouldn't be approved yet.
Career Lattices, Not Career Ladders
"Where do you see yourself in five years?" If an employee genuinely can't answer that, they're already halfway out the door in their own head.
The old model was a straight career ladder, junior to senior to manager to director. That model doesn't really hold up anymore in flatter modern organizations, because there simply aren't enough management seats for everyone who deserves to grow. A career lattice replaces the single upward path with three: vertical growth through taking on people management, lateral growth by moving sideways into an adjacent department (a sales rep moving into customer success, for instance), and depth growth, becoming a genuine subject matter expert without ever taking on direct reports, a senior engineer track that sits alongside, not beneath, the engineering manager track.
A stay interview, run once a year proactively rather than waiting for the exit interview, is the practical tool for building this out with each employee. The question worth asking directly: what skills do you need to learn this year to be ready for the role you actually want next year, and how do we build a 70-20-10 plan around exactly that?
Before we move on to Compensation, worth checking honestly: have you actually identified the critical skills gap in your top three departments, or is that still a guess? Look back at your last three training initiatives, were they 100% formal classroom training, or genuinely balanced with real experience? Does every department have some kind of visible career path document showing the moves that are actually possible? And is your L&D budget going toward closing real skills gaps, or mostly toward perks that feel good but don't move the needle?
By HR Mit – An HR Professional
