Training and Development Manager Job Description

A Training and Development Manager owns the system an organization uses to build skills in its own workforce. BLS defines the occupation as planning, coordinating and directing skills- and knowledge-enhancement programs for an organization's staff. In practice that means three jobs at once: deciding what gets taught, running the team and vendors that produce it, and proving to the people who fund it that it worked.

The first job is diagnosis. A sales director asks for negotiation training because deals are slipping; a plant manager wants a refresher after a near miss. A good training manager treats each request as a symptom and asks what is actually going wrong before anyone books a room or buys a course. Sometimes the answer is a skill gap. Sometimes it is a broken process, an unclear quota or a supervisor who never reinforces the standard, and no amount of e-learning will fix it. Saying so, politely and with evidence, is part of the role.

The second job is production and delivery. The manager directs instructional designers, facilitators, program developers and LMS administrators, assigns projects, reviews drafts and decides when a course is ready. Delivery can be a facilitated workshop, a virtual session, a self-paced module in Cornerstone, Workday Learning or Docebo, a short video, or a job aid built in Articulate Rise. Purchased content from outside vendors still needs a check against the company's real procedures before it goes live. BLS describes managers teaching training methods to the specialists, who then instruct employees new and experienced, and notes that some managers still lead courses themselves.

The third job is money and measurement. The manager builds the training budget, picks vendors, and keeps spending inside the plan. Evaluation goes beyond completion rates: did the onboarding program shorten the time to a new hire's first solo shift, did supervisor training show up in turnover or grievance numbers, did safety training change what people do on the floor. One frame is the Kirkpatrick model's four levels of reaction, learning, behavior and results; the hard part is getting operating data from the business to compare before and after.

Underneath all of that sits the mandatory calendar: harassment prevention, workplace safety, data privacy, and any licensing or continuing-education requirements in a regulated industry. Completion records have to be clean and retrievable, because they are what an employer shows a regulator or a court. Keeping that machinery reliable without letting it swallow the team's time is a constant scheduling problem.

A typical week mixes meetings with business leaders, design reviews, vendor calls and LMS reports. Training and development managers work in nearly every industry, BLS says, and typically in offices, with some travel between a main office and regional offices or training facilities. They typically work full time, and some work more than 40 hours per week.

Education is usually a bachelor's degree. BLS lists common fields as business, communications and social science, and says some employers prefer or require a master's degree with a concentration in training and development, human resources management, organizational development or business administration. Coursework in instructional design, behavioral psychology or educational psychology also helps, according to the same BLS profile.

Experience is the other requirement. BLS calls related work experience essential and lists management, teaching, training and development, or another human resources field as typical backgrounds. As a rough guide, people reach this title after five or more years in the field, often starting as a training and development specialist, an instructional designer or a classroom teacher, then taking on a team lead role. Some employers want experience in their own industry as well, so a manager in a hospital system or a bank may come up through clinical education or branch operations.

BLS says certification is not required, though some employers prefer candidates who have it and some positions require it. The most direct fit is the Certified Professional in Talent Development (CPTD), awarded by the ATD Certification Institute. Its January 2026 handbook sets three routes to eligibility: five years of experience and 60 hours of qualified professional development, four years of experience with a current Associate Professional in Talent Development (APTD) credential, or five years of experience plus an ATD Master program completed within the past five years. Managers who sit inside a broader HR department can add the SHRM Senior Certified Professional (SHRM-SCP) from SHRM.

The skills that separate a manager from a strong practitioner are mostly business skills:

• Performance consulting: turning a vague request into a defined problem and a measurable target.
• Budgeting: building a plan, defending it to finance and hitting it.
• Vendor management: comparing content libraries, authoring tools and outside facilitators on cost and quality.
• Learning technology: enough LMS administration, SCORM or xAPI knowledge and authoring-tool fluency in Articulate Storyline or Rise to judge what the team builds and what a platform can actually report.
• Measurement: designing evaluation that reaches behavior and business results, then presenting it in the operating language executives use.
• People leadership: hiring, coaching and reviewing a team whose members have very different crafts.

A portfolio helps. Bring two or three programs you owned from needs analysis through evaluation, with what changed afterward, rather than a list of courses delivered.

BLS projects employment of training and development managers to grow 6 percent from 2025 to 2035, which it rates as faster than the average for all occupations. The occupation held about 50,200 jobs in 2025, and BLS expects about 4,100 openings a year on average over the decade, many of them from managers who retire or move into other occupations. BLS ties the demand to continuing education requirements across many occupations and to new training methods and learning technology that managers are needed to fold into programs.

Pay depends on where the job sits. May 2025 industry medians ran from $114,970 in educational services and $116,990 in healthcare and social assistance to $133,600 in finance and insurance, $137,530 in management of companies and $156,440 in professional, scientific, and technical services.

Leader sentiment is one near-term signal. The Association for Talent Development's 2026 State of the Industry report put its TD Executive Confidence Index, which measures talent development leaders' expectations for the next six months on a 100-point scale, at 63.1 for 2025, down 4.1 points from 67.2 in 2024. ATD says readings above 50 reflect a more positive outlook for the learning function, so the 2025 reading stayed above that line despite the drop.

AI is changing how the work gets done. SHRM's 2026 L&D Executives: Priorities and Perspectives report, based on 223 L&D executives, found 84% expect using AI to develop learning content to become more or much more prevalent over the next year, 82% expect the same for AI-created personalized learning, and 77% expect organizations to use AI to upskill their workforces. The same report found skills training was the top priority for 36% of leaders, up from 33% in 2025, and that 48% named upskilling the workforce to close skills gaps as an organizational challenge. For a manager, those expectations turn into policy questions: which content may be drafted by a tool, who checks a generated module or quiz bank against current procedure and law, and how approvals are recorded so an auditor can follow them.

Tax rules matter for the managers who run tuition programs. Under Section 127 of the Internal Revenue Code, an educational assistance program is a separate written plan of an employer, and the IRS caps tax-free benefits at $5,250 per calendar year, with the cap adjusted for increases in the cost of living for taxable years beginning after 2026. The 2025 One, Big, Beautiful Bill Act made permanent the expansion that lets employer payments on an employee's qualified education loans count as educational assistance. Plan documents and benefit communications should reflect both changes.

Career paths lead to director of learning, head of talent development, or a broader HR leadership role, and some experienced managers move into consulting on learning strategy or measurement.

Dear Ms. Alvarez,

I would like to be considered for the opening on your learning team at Ridgeline Health Partners. For the past six years I have run learning programs for a regional logistics company with eleven distribution centers, and I would like to bring that work to a health system where training quality shows up directly in patient and staff safety.

When I took over the training team, our onboarding program was a week of slides that new warehouse associates forgot by their second shift. I spent a month on the floor with supervisors before changing anything. The fix turned out to be less content and more practice: we cut the classroom portion in half, added scanner and equipment practice stations, and gave every new hire a trained peer coach for the first two weeks. Supervisors now sign off on each skill on the floor instead of in a classroom quiz, and the sign-off data feeds a monthly report I review with each site manager.

I manage a team of four, two instructional designers, a facilitator and an LMS administrator, and I have learned that my main job is clearing the way for them: getting subject matter experts to show up, protecting design time from last-minute requests, and telling a vice president when a course will not solve the problem he brought me. Last year I also wrote the review process for AI-drafted content in our authoring tool, so every generated module is checked against current procedures by a named reviewer before release.

I hold the CPTD and have managed a training budget, vendor contracts and our compliance calendar through two external audits. I would welcome the chance to talk about how your clinical education and leadership programs fit together and where you see the gaps.

Sincerely, Jordan Reyes