What Is Learning and Development (L&D)? A Guide for Employers

What is learning and development?

Learning and development is the work of helping employees gain the knowledge and skills they need, then keep growing into bigger roles. The Bureau of Labor Statistics describes the people who do it this way: training and development specialists “plan and administer programs that improve the skills and knowledge of their employees.”

The definition is simple. The scope is wider than most employers expect. L&D is not only the class someone attends. It is also the stretch assignment their manager hands them, the coaching conversation after a rough meeting, and the plan that ties all of it to a role they want in two years.

You will also hear “training and development,” or T&D. The two terms overlap almost completely. T&D tends to describe what the organization delivers. L&D tends to describe what the employee builds, through any route that works. We cover that comparison in our guide to employee training and development. This article goes one level down: what the L&D function actually owns, how the 70-20-10 model holds up in practice, and what L&D looks like at your headcount.

What an L&D function owns

The BLS duty list for training and development managers is a useful checklist, because it describes the full job whether one person does it or a team of twenty. Training and development managers typically:

• Assess employees’ needs for training
• Align training with the organization’s goals
• Create and manage training budgets
• Develop and implement training programs
• Review and select training materials from a variety of vendors
• Update training programs to ensure that they are relevant
• Teach training methods and skills to instructors and supervisors
• Evaluate the effectiveness of training programs and instructors

Read that list again and notice how much of it happens outside a classroom. Needs assessment, budget, vendor selection and evaluation are planning and management work. If you have nobody with L&D in their title, this work still exists. It just lands on HR generalists and managers, usually without the time set aside to do it.

The clearest way to organize it is by who owns what:

The managers row is where most programs succeed or fail. Half of the L&D professionals in LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report said managers lack the support they need to help with career development. A course without a manager reinforcing it afterward fades fast.

Is learning and development part of HR?

Usually, yes. At many small and midsize employers, L&D sits inside HR and is one of several jobs an HR generalist covers. Larger organizations often build a separate L&D or talent development team, sometimes led by a chief learning officer, that partners with HR rather than reporting into it.

It is also a real career track. BLS counted about 472,500 training and development specialist jobs and about 50,200 training and development manager jobs in 2025. Median pay was $69,280 for specialists and $133,000 for managers in May 2025, and specialist employment is projected to grow 11 percent from 2025 to 2035, much faster than average.

The 70-20-10 model: where it holds up and where it breaks

The 70-20-10 model is the most quoted idea in L&D. It says people learn roughly 70 percent from challenging experiences and assignments, 20 percent from developmental relationships, and 10 percent from coursework and training. The Center for Creative Leadership traces the rule to its long-running Lessons of Experience research, which asked successful leaders which experiences shaped them. The ratio is most often credited to Michael Lombardo and Robert Eichinger’s The Career Architect Development Planner (1996).

Where it holds up

The core point is right. Most growth happens on the job, not in a classroom. An employer that thinks of development as “send them to a course” is ignoring the biggest lever it has: what work people are given and who helps them through it.

Where it breaks

• The numbers are not measurements. They come from what leaders remembered about their own development. Treat them as a rough shape, not a formula, and do not build a budget split around exact percentages.
• It gets used to cut formal training. “Only 10 percent of learning is formal” is not an argument for spending less on it. The 10 is often what gives people the vocabulary and the models that make the 70 and the 20 useful.
• The 70 does not happen by itself. A stretch assignment with no debrief is just a hard assignment. Experience turns into learning when someone plans it, names what it should teach, and talks it through afterward.

The practical version: plan all three on purpose. Pick the assignment, name the person who will coach through it, and add the one course that teaches the skill underneath. That is exactly the structure of a good employee development plan.

What L&D looks like at your headcount

There is no single right setup. What changes with size is who does the work and how much of it is bought rather than built.

Smaller employers often spend more per person, not less. In Training magazine’s 2025 Training Industry Report, which surveyed U.S. organizations with 100 or more employees, small companies spent $1,091 per learner, midsize companies $782, and large corporations $468. Without scale, every seat costs more, which is one reason smaller teams lean on public courses and outside providers rather than building content themselves.

Why L&D matters to employers

The business case comes down to keeping skills in the building.

• Retention. In LinkedIn’s 2025 report, 88 percent of organizations said they are concerned about employee retention, and providing learning opportunities was the No. 1 retention strategy respondents named.
• Satisfaction. In Gallup’s 2025 survey of 15,968 U.S. employees, 48 percent of those who took part in a mentorship program in the past year reported high job satisfaction, versus 29 percent of those who did not. Gallup found similar patterns for employer-sponsored skills training.
• Replacement cost. Gallup estimates that replacing a leader or manager costs around 200 percent of their salary, a technical professional 80 percent, and a frontline employee 40 percent, in 42% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored.

LinkedIn also found that career progress is people’s No. 1 motivation to learn. L&D that connects to a next role gets used. L&D that feels like a compliance checkbox gets clicked through.

For the leadership side of that case, see why leadership development is important.

How to build a learning and development strategy

A strategy does not need to be long. It needs to answer five questions in order.

1. What business problem are we solving? Turnover in one department, slow ramp-up for new hires, supervisors who escalate everything. Start with the problem, not the course catalog.
2. Who needs to change what they do? Name the audience and the behavior. “New supervisors handle performance conversations without escalating” is a target. “Better leadership” is not.
3. What mix of experience, coaching and coursework will build it? Plan all three, using 70-20-10 as a rough shape.
4. Do we build it or buy it? Build what is unique to your business, like your systems and your products. Buy what is not, like supervision skills, Excel, and employment law basics.
5. How will we know it worked? Choose the metric before the program starts, and check whether behavior changed on the job, not just whether people finished.

For a manager-focused program, our step-by-step guide on how to build a leadership development program walks through each stage.

Courses that help HR run L&D well

If L&D is one of your many hats, these build the skills the function depends on. Each page lets you pick a date and register.

*Non-member price first, then the Catapult member price, per seat, as of October 2026. See each course page for current dates and pricing.

Training a whole team? Catapult also runs private and on-site training, and our employee learning and development programs cover leadership development, manager training and custom eLearning on one platform.

Where to start

Pick one business problem and one group of employees. Write down the behavior you want to see in six months. Then plan the assignment, the coaching and the one course that will build it. A small program that changes how people work beats a large catalog nobody uses.