BACK
At the start of a new year, L&D Managers often find themselves navigating a tidal wave of new requests, each one positioned as critical, time-sensitive, and business-defining.
It can feel impossible to balance expectations while protecting your team’s time and maintaining strategic focus.
This guide helps you move from overwhelmed to organised, giving you practical ways to prioritise fairly and confidently.
1. Start with a clear L&D strategy (your north star)
A strong L&D strategy becomes your anchor when the requests start rolling in, and everything sounds equally important. It gives you a lens to filter what truly matters from what’s simply urgent in someone else’s world.
With a strategy in place, you’re no longer reacting to noise; you’re prioritising based on long-term goals and organisational impact.
Why this matters
A solid strategy helps you stay focused, avoids scattered effort, and ensures your resources support meaningful outcomes instead of fragmented, ad hoc training.
What to include
- Business priorities for the next 12–24 months
- Critical skills and capability gaps
- Key programmes the organisation has committed to
- Role-based development pathways
- Clear success measures
When stakeholders understand this foundation, they also understand why not everything can sit at the top of the list.
2. Implement a learning intake process that creates clarity
A simple intake process helps you turn vague requests into clear, actionable information.
It sets expectations from the start and gives you a fair way to compare projects. Instead of prioritising whoever shouts the loudest, you prioritise based on consistent, useful details.
Why this matters
It shifts L&D from reactive to proactive, reduces back-and-forth, and creates transparency around what is and isn’t a priority.
What your intake form should ask
- What problem are we trying to solve?
- What behaviour needs to change?
- What’s the impact if we do nothing?
- Who is the audience and why does it matter?
- What already exists that we can leverage?
- What is the real reason for the suggested deadline?
- What does success look like?
When every request is assessed with the same set of questions, prioritisation becomes fair, logical, and defensible.
3. Use a prioritisation framework everyone can understand
When every stakeholder insists their project is essential, a transparent prioritisation framework takes the emotion out of decision-making.
It gives you a structured, objective way to compare very different requests, and helps stakeholders understand how decisions are made.
Why this matters
It eliminates bias, reduces conflict, builds trust, and helps you stand firm when deadlines or expectations feel unrealistic.
A simple 5-factor model
Score each request on:
- Strategic alignment
- Business impact
- Audience size
- Risk of not acting
- Effort vs. value
This turns prioritisation from guesswork into clear, evidence-based decision-making.
4. Shift the conversation from “training” to “performance”
Most “urgent” training requests become far less urgent when you dig into what’s happening.
By reframing the conversation around performance, you uncover whether training is the right solution, or if the issue is something else entirely.
Why this matters
It prevents wasted effort, ensures L&D resources are used wisely, and positions you as a strategic partner rather than an order-taker.
Questions that change the conversation
- What’s happening now vs. what should be happening?
- What behaviour needs to change?
- Is this root cause related to skills, process, resources, or leadership?
- What tangible impact is this problem having today?
This approach leads to smarter solutions, and a lot fewer “urgent” courses.
5. Create tiered service levels (gold / silver / bronze)
A tiered model allows you to support more requests without burning out your team. Not every project requires the same level of build, and not every request warrants full custom content.
Service tiers help you match your effort to the project’s true importance.
Why this matters
It allows your team to work smarter, not harder, and helps stakeholders understand why smaller requests won’t always get a full bespoke solution.
Example tiers
- Gold: High-impact, long-term, strategic programmes
- Silver: Medium-impact, targeted builds
- Bronze: Quick support, resource curation, or templates
This approach keeps your workload balanced and your impact high.
6. Build communication scripts for pushback and negotiation
The hardest part of prioritisation isn’t the scoring or the strategy, it’s the conversations. Having confident, empathetic scripts reduces the awkwardness and helps you communicate boundaries while maintaining strong relationships.
Why this matters
Clear language protects your time, reduces conflict, and reassures stakeholders that you’re not saying “no”, you’re managing priorities responsibly.
Simple scripts you can use
- “To give this the quality it deserves, we’ll need more time. Let’s explore what support we can offer in the meantime.”
- “We’re focusing on strategic priorities first. Let’s look at how this request fits within the wider goals.”
- “This seems like a process or communication issue rather than a learning need. Let’s explore the right solution together.”
These scripts help you redirect the conversation without damaging the relationship.
7. Publish a transparent L&D roadmap for the year
A public roadmap is one of the most effective tools for reducing confusion, repeated questions, and unrealistic expectations. It helps stakeholders see exactly where their request sits and why.
Why this matters
It builds trust, shows strategic intent, and reduces the perception that L&D is ignoring or delaying work.
What to include
- Current projects
- Upcoming projects
- Items in the discovery phase
- Pending requests/parking lot
- Prioritisation criteria
- Team capacity and timelines
Visibility turns chaos into clarity.
FAQs on handling learning requests
1. How do L&D Managers decide what to prioritise?
They use strategic alignment, business impact, audience reach, risk, and effort-to-value scoring to make fair, evidence-based decisions.
2. What should a learning intake form include?
Clear problem statements, behaviour change goals, audience details, business impact, deadlines, existing resources, and success measures.
3. How do I push back politely on urgent requests?
Use performance-focused questions, refer to your prioritisation framework, and connect everything back to the agreed L&D strategy.
4. Why is a structured intake process important?
It stops reactive decisions, ensures consistency, and helps L&D fairly compare very different requests.
5. How can I reduce non-learning requests?
By diagnosing the root cause early, offering curated resources when appropriate, and creating clear service tiers so stakeholders understand the level of support they can expect.