What Is Training and Development in HR? A Complete Guide for Employers
Reading Time: 13 minutes - Training and development in HR is the function that builds the skills employees need now (training) and prepares them for what is next (development). Both sit under the broader umbrella of learning and development, or L&D.
- U.S. organizations spent $102.8 billion on training in 2025, about $874 per learner, but the average employee received only 40 hours of training, down from 47 the year before.
- Only 63% of U.S. employees say their organization offers real advancement opportunities. One in four says it does not.
- Employees who receive skills training are two-thirds more likely to report high job satisfaction than employees who do not.
- The programs that work are not the ones with the biggest budgets. They are the ones tied to a specific business problem, aimed at a specific audience, and measured against something other than attendance.
Every employer trains people. Far fewer can say what the training was supposed to fix, who it was built for, or whether anything changed afterward.
That gap is what the training and development function exists to close. Here is what it covers, what it costs, what the current research says it returns, and how to build a program that survives a budget review.
Training and development in HR is the function responsible for building the skills, knowledge, and behaviors employees need to do their jobs today and grow into bigger roles tomorrow. Training addresses current job performance. Development prepares people for future responsibility. Together they form the backbone of workforce capability.
What is HR training and development?
HR training and development is the function responsible for building the skills, knowledge, and behaviors employees need to do their jobs today and grow into bigger roles tomorrow. Training addresses current job performance. Development prepares people for future responsibility.
In practice, the training and development function owns a specific set of jobs inside an organization:
- Identifying skill gaps between what the business needs and what the workforce can currently do
- Designing or sourcing programs that close those gaps
- Delivering learning in formats people will actually complete
- Tracking whether any of it changed behavior on the job
- Keeping the organization compliant with training the law requires
That last one matters more than most employers realize. A meaningful share of every training calendar is not optional. It is harassment prevention, safety, wage and hour rules for supervisors, and industry-specific requirements that carry real liability when they are skipped.
Training vs. development: the distinction that actually matters
The two words get used interchangeably, and in casual conversation that is fine. But the distinction shapes how you budget, how you schedule, and how you measure.
| Training | Development | |
|---|---|---|
| Time horizon | Now | The next 1 to 5 years |
| Focus | The job the person holds | The person’s capability and career |
| Typical trigger | A performance gap, a new system, a legal requirement | Succession planning, retention risk, high-potential identification |
| Format | Short, specific, skill-based | A longer arc. Certificate programs, coaching, stretch assignments, mentorship |
| Success looks like | The task gets done correctly | The person is ready for a role they do not have yet |
| Example | A two-hour workshop on conducting lawful interviews | A three-day supervision certificate program for a rising individual contributor |
A useful gut check: if the person leaves the role, does the investment leave with them? Training tends to be role-bound. Development travels with the person, which is exactly why it works as a retention tool and exactly why some employers hesitate to fund it.
That hesitation is usually backwards. The employees most likely to leave over a lack of growth are the ones you least want to lose.
L&D vs. T&D: is there a difference?
You will see both acronyms, sometimes on the same org chart. The distinction is more about philosophy than function. T&D is the older term, and it centers on what the organization delivers: courses, workshops, curricula. L&D is the more current one, and it centers on the capability the employee builds through whatever works. Formal courses, yes, but also coaching, peer learning, on-the-job practice, and stretch assignments.
Do not get precious about the label. What matters is whether your program design assumes learning only happens in a classroom, because if it does, you are leaving most of the value on the table.
The deeper comparison lives one level down: what an L&D function actually owns, where the 70-20-10 model holds up and where it breaks, and what the function looks like at your headcount. That is our complete guide to learning and development.
Types of training and development programs
Most training calendars are built from the same eight categories. Knowing which ones you are over- and under-investing in is the fastest way to find the gap in your program.
1. Onboarding and orientation
The first 90 days. Covers company systems, policies, role expectations, and the informal knowledge that separates a new hire who is productive in three weeks from one who is productive in three months.
2. Compliance and mandatory training
Harassment prevention, workplace safety, data handling, industry-specific requirements. This category is non-negotiable and increasingly state-specific. A number of states mandate harassment prevention training on defined schedules, and requirements differ meaningfully across state lines for multi-state employers. Catapult’s harassment prevention and compliance training is built around the current requirements.
3. Leadership and management development
The category with the widest gap between how much it matters and how much it gets funded. Most managers are promoted for individual performance and then handed a team with no instruction on how to lead one. Multi-session leadership and management development programs build the capability systematically. Single-session manager development workshops handle specific skills such as difficult conversations, coaching, feedback, and conflict.
Turning that into a sequenced program rather than a run of workshops, including who to develop first, how the levels differ, and what a cohort actually costs, is its own project. We cover it step by step in how to build a leadership development program. We have also written separately about what the data says about new manager training and why the timing of a manager program affects whether it sticks.
4. Technical and digital skills
Software, systems, and increasingly AI tools. This is the fastest-changing category and the one where content goes stale quickest. Technology and digital skills training covers the practical end: Microsoft Office, applied AI, and the workplace tools people use daily.
5. Professional and soft skills
Communication, presentation, time management, collaboration, business writing. Chronically undervalued because the outcomes are hard to put on a dashboard, and chronically the reason projects fail. Professional development and soft skills programs address the layer between technical competence and actual effectiveness.
6. HR-specific training and certification
For the HR function itself: employment law updates, investigations, compensation, benefits administration. HR training and HRCI and SHRM certification prep keep the people who run the function current and credentialed.
7. Cross-training and job rotation
Building bench strength by teaching people adjacent roles. Low cost, high resilience payoff, consistently underused.
8. Coaching and mentorship
The most individualized and, per Gallup’s 2025 data, one of the highest-impact. Employees who participated in mentorship were substantially more likely to report high job satisfaction than those who did not.
You can browse the full course catalog across these categories, or start with Catapult’s training catalog to see what is running near you.
What employers actually spend on training
Two credible sources track this, and they use different methodologies. That is worth knowing before you benchmark yourself against either.
| Metric | Training Magazine, 2025 report | ATD, 2026 report on 2025 data |
|---|---|---|
| Spend per person | $874 per learner | $846 per employee |
| Prior year spend | $774 per learner | Not comparable, see note |
| Training hours per person | 40 hours, all learning | 16.7 hours, formal learning only |
| Prior year hours | 47 hours | 13.7 hours |
| Total U.S. expenditure | $102.8 billion, up about 5% | Not reported |
The gap between 40 hours and 16.7 hours is not a contradiction. Training Magazine reports total training hours received. ATD reports formal learning hours used. The difference is a reminder that most benchmarks measure different things, and that the informal learning the L&D framing tries to capture rarely shows up in either number.
Outsourcing runs on top of that. The average employer spent $217,178 with outside training providers, roughly 7% of the total training budget.
One more number worth sitting with. Per ATD, 47% of talent development leaders expect their budget to stay flat over the next six months and 25% expect it to decrease. Formal learning hours went up over the same period, from 13.7 to 16.7, while budgets are expected to hold or shrink. Teams are being asked to deliver more with less, which makes the question of what you are measuring far more urgent than the question of how much you are spending.
The ROI: why training and development matters to employers
The case for training gets made two ways. One is about what you gain. The other is about what you lose by skipping it.
Training moves job satisfaction, measurably
Gallup surveyed 15,968 U.S. workers between January and February 2025. The pattern was consistent across three different kinds of development.
Employees who received skills training were roughly two-thirds more likely to report high satisfaction than employees who did not.
The advancement gap is a retention problem
In the same Gallup data, 63% of U.S. employees said their organization provides opportunities for career advancement, while roughly one in four said it does not. The gap also runs along education lines. 57% of workers with a high school education or less saw advancement opportunities, against 68% of those with a bachelor’s degree.
That gap is where your frontline turnover comes from.
Retention is now the stated reason organizations invest
LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found 88% of organizations are concerned about employee retention, and that providing learning opportunities was cited as the number one retention strategy. On the employee side, 84% agree that learning adds purpose to their work, and career progress ranks as their top motivation to learn.
The manager gap is the weak link
The same LinkedIn report found only 15% of employees said their manager helped them build a career plan in the past six months, down five percentage points from the prior year. And 49% of L&D professionals see a skills crisis in how well employee skills align with business strategy.
This is the finding that should change how you spend. You can run excellent programs and still get poor results if managers are not equipped to have career conversations. Development that is not reinforced by a manager does not convert. Manager capability is the multiplier on every other line in your training budget.
And the cost of doing nothing
Turnover is the expense that shows up whether or not you fund training. Replacement costs, including recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and institutional knowledge that walks out, scale with the role. Gallup estimates that replacing leaders and managers costs around 200% of their salary, replacing professionals in technical roles costs 80% of salary, and replacing frontline employees costs 40%. Against a $874-per-learner benchmark, the math is not close.
That arithmetic is sharpest at the manager level, where the multiple is highest and the damage travels to a whole team. The full version of the argument, including what an untrained manager costs and why hiring an experienced replacement rarely pencils out, sits in why leadership development is important.
How to build a training and development program
Six steps, and the order is the hard part. Most employers start at step four.
- Start with a business problem, not a course catalog. Write down what is going wrong in numbers a colleague in finance would recognize: turnover in a named department, error rates, time-to-productivity, supervisor roles filled from outside. A course catalog cannot tell you which of those it is supposed to fix.
- Run a training needs assessment. Compare required capability against current capability. Pull from performance data, exit interviews, manager input, engagement survey results, and the employees themselves. The gap between those two lists is your curriculum.
- Segment your audience. Executives, mid-level managers, new supervisors, individual contributors, and the HR function need different things. Programs built for everyone tend to land for no one.
- Choose format based on the outcome, not the budget. Compliance content works fine self-paced. Behavior change, such as difficult conversations, coaching, and conflict, needs practice, feedback, and other humans in the room. Certificate programs work when the goal is a credentialed step change in capability.
- Build in reinforcement. The workshop is the beginning, not the deliverable. Manager follow-up, applied assignments, and spaced practice are what turn a good day of training into changed behavior in week six. Written employee development plans are how that follow-up gets scheduled rather than merely intended.
- Measure something other than attendance. Completion rates tell you people showed up. Use the Kirkpatrick framework as a ladder: reaction (did they like it), learning (did they retain it), behavior (did they do it differently), results (did the business metric move). Most organizations stop at level one. Getting to level three is where credibility comes from.
That is the generic version, and it holds for compliance, technical, and soft-skills programs alike. Leadership is the exception that needs its own build: a named population, levels with prerequisites, cohorts rather than registrations, and an executive sponsor. That version has its own guide, how to build a leadership development program.
How to measure training effectiveness
Four questions that survive scrutiny in a budget meeting:
- Did behavior change? Check two to three months out, through the participant’s manager, not an end-of-course survey.
- Did the business metric from step one move? Turnover in a specific department, safety incidents, time-to-productivity, error rates, promotion-from-within rate.
- Are you filling more roles from inside? Internal mobility rate is the one most executives already understand without a briefing.
- What did it cost per learner against the benchmark? $846 to $874 is the current market range.
The single most useful discipline: pick the number before you buy the training. A metric chosen afterward is a story, not a result.
Program-specific measures go a layer deeper, including bench readiness, retention among participants against a matched group, and promotion rates by cohort. Those are set out in the leadership development program guide.
Frequently asked questions about training and development in HR
What is the difference between training and development?
Training builds the skills an employee needs for their current role and delivers results in the short term. Development prepares an employee for future roles and responsibilities over a longer horizon. Training is role-bound. Development travels with the person.
Is training and development part of HR?
In most organizations, yes. Training and development is a core HR function alongside recruiting, compensation, and employee relations. In larger organizations it often operates as a distinct L&D team with its own budget and leadership, but it still reports through or partners closely with HR.
How much should a company spend on training per employee?
Current benchmarks put average spend between $846 and $874 per employee per year, depending on the source and methodology. Budgets vary widely by size. Large organizations average $11.7 million annually, midsize $1.6 million, and small companies $333,305.
How many hours of training should employees receive?
Employees received an average of 40 hours of training per year in 2025, per Training Magazine, though only about 16.7 of those hours were formal learning, per ATD. Both figures are averages across all industries, and regulated industries run considerably higher.
What types of training are legally required?
It depends on your state and industry. Harassment prevention training is mandated in a growing number of states on defined schedules, and safety training requirements vary by industry. Multi-state employers should audit requirements state by state rather than assuming one standard covers everyone.
How do you measure training ROI?
Define the business metric you expect to move before the program starts, establish a baseline, then measure behavior change at 60 to 90 days and the business outcome over the following two to four quarters. Compare that against program cost. Completion rates and satisfaction surveys are inputs, not ROI.
Does training and development actually improve retention?
The evidence is consistent. Gallup’s 2025 data shows employees who receive skills training report high job satisfaction at 45% against 27% without it, and LinkedIn’s 2025 Workplace Learning Report found organizations cite learning opportunities as their number one retention strategy. Training works best as a retention tool when managers reinforce it, and only 15% of employees report a manager helped build their career plan in the past six months.
Where to start
If you are building a training and development program from scratch, start with the two categories that carry the most risk and the most leverage. Compliance training, because the liability is real and immediate. Manager development, because manager capability multiplies everything else you invest in.
Catapult has trained employers across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia since 1958, with practitioner-led courses across 10 topic areas, most HRCI- and SHRM-approved, delivered in person, live virtual, or self-paced.
- Training Magazine, 2025 Training Industry Report, for U.S. training expenditure, spend per learner, training hours, and budgets by company size.
- Association for Talent Development, 2026 State of the Industry Report, for direct learning expenditure per employee, formal learning hours, and budget expectations.
- Gallup, One in Four U.S. Employees Lack Advancement Opportunities, survey conducted January 13 to February 25, 2025, n=15,968 U.S. workers, for the advancement opportunity and job satisfaction data.
- LinkedIn Learning, 2025 Workplace Learning Report, for retention concern, learning as a retention strategy, the manager career-planning gap, and the skills crisis figure.
- Gallup, 42% of Employee Turnover Is Preventable but Often Ignored, July 2024, for role-specific replacement cost multiples for leaders and managers, technical professionals, and frontline employees.
Written by Carlie Houchins, Ed.D., Director of Learning Solutions at Catapult, and fact checked by the Catapult HR Team. Every figure above was checked against its primary source. These studies come from different years and samples, so read them as a pattern rather than one dataset. We update this page when the underlying research changes. Questions or a correction? Email info@letscatapult.org or call 866-440-0302.
Carlie Houchins, Ed.D., is Director of Learning Solutions at Catapult, where she leads learning and development strategy and program design. Her work centers on helping organizations build leadership capability and support employee growth, across leadership development, training program design, eLearning, and capability building. She also speaks at conferences, chamber events, and professional development sessions. Catapult is an employers association founded in 1958 that serves member employers across North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and supports members nationwide.
