Less Scatter, More Strategy: A Better Way to Plan Public Sector Learning
- Justine Hinderliter
- Apr 24
- 2 min read
Updated: Apr 28
Learning and development (L&D) efforts often begin with the best of intentions—fulfilling staff requests, responding to urgent needs, or offering timely sessions on leadership, compliance, or equity. But too often, these offerings live in isolation from the broader goals of the organization.
We created a Learning and Development Strategy Template to help change that.
It’s a simple, practical tool that supports public sector learning and HR leaders in building an intentional learning strategy—one that’s deeply aligned with your agency’s business objectives and capacity-building needs.
It’s not a planning worksheet, it’s a reframing tool. A prompt to move from “What should we offer next quarter?” to “What kind of learning will help us accomplish what matters most?”
The Real Challenge Isn’t Training, It’s Alignment.
In our work with public agencies, we often see the same dynamic: staff are eager to learn; leaders are supportive. The appetite is there... but the link between learning and organizational strategy is often assumed rather than explicit.
That disconnect can lead to well-executed training programs that don’t ultimately build the capabilities the organization needs most. Or worse, a sense that “training” is disconnected from the real work and ends up just checking a box.
This template is designed to help close that alignment gap—by walking you through four phases of strategic L&D planning:
1. Assess & Align – Start by mapping your organizational goals and identifying the capabilities needed to achieve them.
2. Strategy Development – Explore the formats, resources, and metrics that will support your learning goals.
3. Prioritization – Make clear decisions about where to focus, what to offer, and who to engage.
4. Communication & Change Management – Plan for how learning will be introduced, reinforced, and sustained across the organization.
Each phase includes guiding questions and notes on the key stakeholders to involve—because real alignment is cross-functional.
When Strategy Drives Learning
One of the ways we’ve seen agencies put this strategic thinking into practice is by identifying a few “high-leverage” learning areas where training can unlock broader impact—like process improvement, digital workflows, or team leadership.
We built Lean Leaders On-Demand, our new self-paced certificate program, with exactly this use case in mind. Some teams we’ve worked with have used our L&D Strategy Template to surface a clear need for internal problem-solving skills—and then adopted Lean Leaders as a practical, accessible way to meet that need, because it's designed for public sector employees who want to grow their capacity to lead process improvement efforts from wherever they sit in the organization.
That’s the power of alignment: the strategy helps you focus. The training helps you follow through.
Putting It Into Practice
Whether you’re building a full L&D strategy or simply trying to make more intentional choices about where to focus your efforts, this template is designed to help start (or deepen) the right conversations. Bring it to your next planning session. Share it with leadership. Use it to align around what learning can really do for your organization.
And if one of your priorities is building internal capacity for problem-solving, continuous improvement, and change management, we’ve developed a new on-demand program that might fit right in.
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