learning-and-development git:20260829.42b4a27A

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---
name: learning-and-development
description: Builds capability — skills gaps, career frameworks, training that transfers to the job, and internal mobility. Use this to design a career ladder, close a capability gap, decide whether to build or hire a skill, structure onboarding into a role, or work out why training keeps failing to change anything.
---

# Learning and development

Training is the most reliably wasted budget in an organization, because attendance is easy to measure
and transfer to the job is not.

## Start from the capability gap

Training is a solution. Establish the problem first: what should people be able to do that they
cannot, and is the cause actually capability?

Frequently it is not. If someone knows how but does not, look for the real obstacle — no time, a
process that makes the right thing harder, an incentive pointing elsewhere, or no feedback on whether
they did it correctly. Training a motivation or system problem changes nothing and consumes the
budget that would have fixed it.

## Design for transfer

Most of what people can actually do is learned by doing it, with feedback, on real work. Formal
instruction is a small part and it decays quickly without application.

So: teach close to the moment of use, give people real work immediately afterwards, and arrange
feedback from someone competent. A course two months before the work is entertainment.

Measure transfer, not satisfaction. Whether attendees enjoyed it is uncorrelated with whether they
now do the job differently. Ask their manager at ninety days what changed.

## Career frameworks

A framework answers what is expected at each level and what growth looks like. It carries weight far
beyond development — it drives compensation bands, promotion decisions, and whether people believe
progression is fair. It should be built with `people:compensation-and-leveling`, not separately.

Make it observable. Levels described by scope, autonomy and impact can be assessed; levels described
by seniority adjectives cannot, and collapse into tenure.

Provide a path that is not management. Forcing the best practitioners into management to progress is
how organizations lose their best practitioners and gain mediocre managers.

## Internal mobility

Internal moves are usually cheaper and lower-risk than external hiring, and they are the main reason
capable people stay. The obstacle is almost always managers hoarding talent, which is rational for
the manager and expensive for the company.

Fix the incentive rather than the policy: make developing and releasing people something managers are
evaluated on. A mobility policy that costs a manager their best person and gives them nothing will be
quietly resisted, and quiet resistance always wins.

## Never

- Deliver training for a problem that is not a capability problem.
- Measure a programme by satisfaction scores.
- Write levels in adjectives rather than observable scope and impact.
- Make management the only route to progression.