A Practical Guide to Standing Up L&D When There’s No Playbook
You just got hired as the first L&D person at a growing company. There’s no LMS. No onboarding program. No documentation worth trusting. Leadership has a list of things they want built yesterday, and your budget is thin.
How would you solve it?
I’ve been here. More than once. And the instinct every time is to start building right away, to prove your value fast. But that instinct will burn you. If you start building solutions before you identify the gaps, you risk wasting your limited budget, your time, and something harder to get back: your credibility.
In my experience, this is how you do it right.
Step 1: Resist the Urge to Build. Start with the Analysis.
When you walk in the door, leadership is going to hand you a list. These are the things they believe will move the needle. Training for the sales team. An onboarding program. Compliance modules. Whatever it is, take that list and set it aside. Not because it doesn’t matter, but because you can’t build a solution without first knowing the full scope of what you are dealing with.
Your Discovery Checklist
This is your discovery phase. You need to learn:
- What already exists. What training materials, documents, SOPs, and job aids are floating around? Where do they live? Are they current? Are they accurate?
- How knowledge is managed. Is there a central source of truth, or are people working out of shared drives, email chains, and sticky notes? Who owns what?
- How training is currently delivered. Is it shadowing? Tribal knowledge? A binder someone made three years ago?
- How completion is tracked. Is anyone tracking whether people actually completed training? Is there a system, or is it the honor code?
- What the compliance landscape looks like. Are there industry-specific requirements? Certifications? Recertification timelines?
- Who the key players are. Who are your subject matter experts? Who are the approvers? Who has influence on the floor that doesn’t show up on the org chart?
- What metrics are being tracked. Is leadership watching specific KPIs? Is anyone connecting training activity to business outcomes, or is it all gut feel?
- How knowledge is validated. Are there assessments? Skill checks? Or does “trained” just mean someone sat through it?
- What the role structure looks like. What are the roles? What are the competencies or performance expectations tied to each one? Are those documented, or do they only exist in a manager’s head?
- What tools and budget you actually have. What is your budget? What systems does the organization already pay for? You may find that the HRIS has training modules nobody ever turned on, or that the company is paying for two tools that do the same thing because nobody audited the stack. Know what you have before you ask for something new.
- Where the organization is headed. This is the one people skip. Find out what the growth plan looks like. Are there new hires coming in the next month? Six months? Is the company expanding into new locations or services? Are there current operational issues causing immediate pain? Your learning strategy needs to solve today’s problems and anticipate tomorrow’s.
As you map out these gaps, start thinking about how you will know when you’ve closed them. The KPIs leadership is already watching are your best starting point. If they care about time to productivity, that becomes your baseline. If turnover is the pain point, track it. You don’t need a full measurement framework on day one, but you should be asking “how will I know this worked?” for every gap you identify. That thinking will shape every decision that follows.
You don’t need a full measurement framework on day one — but you should be asking “how will I know this worked?” for every gap you identify.
Get Out from Behind the Desk
None of this happens from behind a desk. You need to talk to people. Interview managers, employees, and SMEs across roles and levels. Ask open-ended questions. Sit in on existing training if there is any. Shadow the work. The documents and systems will tell you part of the story, but the people doing the work every day will tell you the rest.
And here’s the part that takes some finesse: as you go through all of this, you are going to find inconsistencies. What a manager tells you is happening is not always what employees will tell you. The process someone describes in a meeting may not match what you observe on the floor. If the organization operates out of multiple locations, expect this to multiply. Each site will have its own version of “how we do things here,” and if the company is small and growing fast, there’s a good chance very little of it is standardized.
You need to surface these gaps. Not in a confrontational way, but tactfully. Ask clarifying questions. Follow up when something doesn’t line up. If you don’t challenge these inconsistencies early, you will build on a foundation of assumptions, and your work will reflect that.
Think Beyond Training
One thing to keep in mind as you go through discovery: not every problem you uncover is a training problem. Some of what surfaces will be process issues, management issues, or resource gaps that no amount of eLearning is going to fix. Recognizing this early and naming it is what separates a strategic L&D professional from someone who just builds courses. I wrote more about how to identify when the real issue is not a training problem in “Just Build a Course” — And Other Things That Aren’t the Answer.
Build Relationships on Purpose
The other thing happening during this phase that you need to be intentional about is relationship building. This is not a byproduct of discovery. It is one of the most important outcomes of it. Every conversation you have, every interview, every time you sit in on a process or shadow someone’s work, you are building the political capital you will need to actually implement what you design. People at the company will be glad you were hired, but that doesn’t mean they will be eager to change how they do things. The trust you build during discovery is what earns you the room to push for change later.
The trust you build during discovery is what earns you the room to push for change later.
Be Ready to Justify the Infrastructure
Here’s a reality of being the first L&D person at a scaling company: you may need to justify the infrastructure itself. And honestly, this is not unique to new organizations. L&D consistently has to demonstrate its value and prove its worth, no matter how established the function is. That is not a bad thing. You should always be thinking about how you help the organization and looking for ways to measure it, because that is what ensures your programs are working as intended. But at a company that has never had L&D, the bar is different. You may find yourself making the case for why you need an authoring tool, why tracking completion matters, or why documentation should live somewhere other than a spreadsheet. Come prepared with justifications, research, and examples. The question will come.
Step 2: Write It Down and Get the Green Light
Once you have done the discovery, talked to people, audited what exists, identified the gaps, and started to see the full picture, you need to write it down.
This is the step that a lot of L&D professionals rush past because they are eager to start building. But you cannot act on anything until you have documented your findings, structured your recommendations, and gotten leadership to sign off on the plan. This is not just a formality. This is where you show the organization that you listened, that you understand their challenges, and that you have a path forward that connects to the things they care about.
Your write-up should include what you found during discovery, what the gaps are, what you are recommending, and what needs to happen in what order. It should also include the infrastructure you need in place before you can start delivering solutions. Knowledge management, delivery systems, tracking, all of it. Leadership needs to see this laid out so they understand why the foundational work comes first. The remaining steps in this post walk through each of those foundational pieces, so by the time you finish reading, you will have a clear picture of what belongs in that plan.
Include a timeline. Even if it is rough, leadership needs to see milestones. When will the knowledge management system be structured? When will the first onboarding materials be ready? When will you be able to deliver something they can see working? You don’t need exact dates for everything, but you need enough of a timeline that leadership can track progress and you have something to hold yourself accountable to.
Include the budget. If you need tools, licenses, or subscriptions, this is where you make that ask. If you found during discovery that the organization is paying for overlapping systems, show that. The plan is your justification for the spend. If you separate the cost conversation from the strategy conversation, you end up having to come back later and make the case from scratch. That is always harder.
Identify Quick Wins
This is important. The foundational work — knowledge management, delivery systems, role mapping — takes time. It is not always visible. And leadership may start to wonder what you are actually doing if all they see is “planning.”
Identify something you can deliver early that demonstrates momentum. Maybe it is a cleaned-up version of an existing onboarding document. Maybe it is a simple job aid that addresses a known pain point. Maybe it is organizing a resource that people have been asking for. Whatever it is, it should be low-effort, high-visibility, and something you can point to while the bigger infrastructure work is in progress. Quick wins keep leadership bought in and give you breathing room to do the foundational work right.
Quick wins keep leadership bought in and give you breathing room to do the foundational work right.
Bring Back Their List
This is where you bring back the list they gave you on day one. Show them how their priorities map into the plan. Show them what needs to be true before those priorities can be executed well. You are not pushing back on what they want. You are showing them the path to getting it done right.
And this is the moment where your role shifts. You go from being “the person we hired to do training” to being the person building a strategic learning function. That distinction matters. Own it from the start.
Expect Pushback
Leadership may look at the plan and want to skip ahead. They may want to reprioritize, move things up, or question why the infrastructure work needs to come first. This is normal. Be prepared for that conversation.
Before you walk into the room, know where you can flex and where the sequence truly cannot be rearranged. Bring supporting material: research, case studies, industry benchmarks, data from organizations that invested in the foundation versus ones that skipped it. If you can show that companies with structured onboarding programs see measurably faster time to productivity, or that organizations without centralized knowledge management spend significantly more time on rework and inconsistency, that is the kind of evidence that moves the conversation from opinion to strategy.
You are not trying to win an argument. You are trying to make it easy for leadership to say yes to the right plan. The more prepared you are with justification, the easier that yes becomes.
Once you have that approval, you can start implementing. And the first things you build are not always training. They are the systems that make your training possible.
Step 3: Identify Your Compliance Requirements
Before you start building anything, you need to know what the organization is legally or contractually required to do. This is a research and planning step. It shapes every build decision that comes after it.
Depending on your industry, there may be specific compliance items that require documented training, tracked completion, and regular recertification. Healthcare, finance, legal, manufacturing: each comes with its own set of requirements. Even industries that don’t seem heavily regulated may have OSHA requirements, data privacy obligations, or contractual training commitments that you need to know about.
Identify these early. Map out what training is required, for which roles, and how frequently. This is not optional work. It often has legal or regulatory implications, and it directly informs what your LMS needs to do and how your knowledge management system needs to be structured. Knowing this upfront will help you make good decisions about those systems.
Determine What Needs to Happen Now
Here is the part that can’t wait. If you discover during your analysis that the organization is not currently meeting its compliance obligations, that becomes your most urgent priority. It does not matter where it falls on leadership’s wish list. Compliance gaps expose the organization to real risk, and the cost of getting it wrong is not theoretical.
A 2024 study by CYPHER Learning found that non-compliant employees cost businesses an average of $1.6 million per year, with the most common causes being employees who either did not know or did not understand the rules.
As of 2025, OSHA’s maximum penalty for a single willful or repeated violation is $165,514, and companies cited for multiple training-related violations routinely see total fines well into six figures (Occupational Safety and Health Administration [OSHA], 2025). EEOC settlements for discrimination and harassment cases tied to inadequate training regularly land in the hundreds of thousands (Colvin, 2024). These are the numbers that get leadership’s attention. Closing compliance gaps is something you can point to immediately as L&D delivering undeniable value.
Assess whether any compliance training needs to go out right away to protect the organization, even before the rest of your infrastructure is in place. This might mean a quick rollout using whatever tools you have available, tracked in a spreadsheet if necessary, while you work on building the systems that will handle it properly going forward. It is not a pretty solution. It is the right one.
Build or Buy
Not all compliance training needs to be built from scratch. Some of it can be purchased off the shelf. Some of it may require external facilitators or certified trainers. Some of it you can build internally if you have the subject matter expertise available.
Map out what falls into each category. Know what you can handle yourself, what you need to purchase, and what requires outside help. This gives you a clearer picture of your budget needs and your timeline, and it feeds directly into your next decision: what your delivery and tracking systems need to be capable of.
Think About How You Will Measure This
As you identify compliance requirements, start thinking about how you will track and report on them. What does “compliant” look like for each requirement? What is the recertification cycle? How will you know when someone is approaching a deadline? How will you demonstrate to leadership, or to an auditor, that the organization is meeting its obligations?
These questions will directly shape what you need from your LMS. If you go into the LMS selection process knowing that you need automated recertification reminders, role-based assignment, and auditor-ready completion reports, you are making an informed purchase. If you don’t, you risk buying a system that can’t do what you actually need it to do.
Step 4: Lock Down Your Knowledge Management
This is your first real build priority, because everything you create from this point forward needs a home. Every SOP, every job aid, every training resource, every policy document.
Whether the organization already has a knowledge management tool or you need to stand one up, this is where you start. If a tool exists, your job is to audit it, clean it up, and establish structure. If one does not exist, you need to get one in place. Either way, the goal is the same: every document the organization relies on needs to live in one place with version control before you start building on top of it. If content is scattered across shared drives, email threads, and someone’s desktop with no version control, you will spend half your time chasing down the right version of the right document.
This might be SharePoint, Confluence, Notion, or something else entirely. What matters is that it exists, it is organized, and people can find what they need.
Plan the Structure Before You Build It
One thing I learned building my first knowledge management system: I initially organized documents into department-specific spaces and referenced them out from there. That works until you realize that documents are often relevant to multiple areas of the organization. A policy that applies to three departments shouldn’t live in one department’s folder with the other two hoping they can find it. The better approach is having one centralized location for all knowledge and then linking that content out to the areas that need it. This lets you maintain a single source of truth while controlling visibility based on role, department, or whatever criteria makes sense for your organization.
Before you start dragging files into folders, take the time to map out your taxonomy. Think about how content will be categorized, tagged, and retrieved. A mind-mapping tool is useful here. Sketch the structure before you build it. It is much easier to reorganize a plan than to reorganize a system that people have already started using.
It is much easier to reorganize a plan than to reorganize a system that people have already started using.
Future-Proof the Foundation
This matters more now than it ever has. AI is rapidly becoming a part of how organizations manage and deliver knowledge. If your knowledge base is messy, duplicated, or scattered across locations, any AI-powered tools you try to layer on top of it will only amplify the chaos. A clean, centralized, well-structured knowledge management system is the foundation for scalability, whether that scalability comes from AI, from growth, or from both.
How You Will Know It Is Working
Think about measurement from the start. Are people actually finding and using what you have built? If your platform supports analytics, track page views, search queries, and usage patterns. If it does not, build in a feedback mechanism. Even something as simple as a periodic check-in with managers — asking whether their people are finding what they need — gives you signal. If nobody is using the knowledge base, the problem is either the structure, the content, or the awareness. You need to know which one so you can fix it.
This is not glamorous work. Leadership probably won’t celebrate you for organizing a SharePoint site. But without this foundation, everything you build on top of it is unstable. I wrote a deeper dive on building a knowledge management system in Your Employees Deserve a Google — Why Knowledge Management Is the Foundation You’re Missing.
Step 5: Establish Your Delivery and Tracking Method
You have your compliance requirements mapped. You have your knowledge management system in place. Now you need a way to deliver learning and track completion.
At a company that’s still figuring itself out, this is a real decision point. And it needs to be an informed one, shaped by what you learned during discovery and compliance mapping.
Choosing Your Delivery Approach
Are you delivering instructor-led training? eLearning? A blend? The answer depends on several factors:
- Size and geography. If you have multiple locations, in-person-only delivery may not scale. You need something that reaches everyone consistently.
- Workforce readiness. If your workforce is not tech-savvy, a complex LMS rollout on day one may create more friction than value. Meet people where they are.
- Work schedules and environment. Can people step away for an hour to take an eLearning course, or do they need short, focused modules they can complete between tasks? A warehouse floor has different constraints than an office. Design for the reality of the work, not the ideal version of it.
- Existing infrastructure. Does the company already have Microsoft 365? Google Workspace? There may be tools already in the stack that can support learning delivery without a separate purchase, at least as a starting point.
- Compliance requirements. Now that you know what your compliance landscape looks like, you know what your delivery and tracking system must be capable of. Can it track recertification windows? Can it generate the completion reports an auditor would need? Can it assign required training by role? These are not nice-to-haves. They are requirements.
- Budget and timeline. An LMS procurement process takes time. Vendor demos, IT review, contract negotiation, implementation, rollout. If you do not have an LMS and need one, this process could take weeks or months. Know that going in, and plan around it. You may need an interim solution while the full system is being stood up.
Tracking: How You Know People Completed It and Whether It Worked
Whatever delivery method you choose, your tracking plan needs to answer two questions: did people complete it, and did it work?
Completion tracking tells you people went through the training. This is the baseline. Your LMS, or whatever system you are using, should be able to tell you who completed what and when.
But completion alone does not tell you much. Assessment scores tell you whether people retained something. Observation or performance data tells you whether it transferred to the job. Feedback surveys tell you how the experience landed. You need all of these layers to have a real picture of whether your training is doing what it is supposed to do.
Completion tracking is the baseline — but you need assessment scores, performance data, and feedback to know whether your training actually worked.
Start building this tracking framework now, even before you have content to deliver. Knowing what data you want to capture shapes how you build everything that follows.
Step 6: Map the Roles and Prioritize
You have your compliance requirements identified. Your knowledge management system is in place. Your delivery and tracking method is established or in progress. Now it is time to look at the roles across the organization and figure out what gets built first.
Identify and Prioritize
Identify every role that will need onboarding and ongoing development. Then prioritize. You cannot build everything at once.
Start with the roles where structured training will have the most immediate impact. That might be the highest-turnover role, the most client-facing position, or the one with the steepest compliance requirements. Look at where the organization is bleeding time, money, or quality because people are not being set up to succeed, and start there.
Build with Scalability in Mind
As you build training for that first role, pay attention to where the content connects to other roles. The product knowledge module you build for your sales team may be 80% applicable to your customer service team. If you design it as a standalone module from the start rather than embedding it in one role’s onboarding track, you can reuse it without rebuilding. That is where scalability lives. Building with these connections in mind from the start means you are not starting from scratch every time you expand to a new role.
The soft skills training for your customer-facing staff may apply across departments. The compliance training for one role may share significant overlap with another. Design for reuse from day one, and you will save yourself enormous amounts of time as the organization grows.
Design for reuse from day one, and you will save yourself enormous amounts of time as the organization grows.
Prepare the People Who Deliver It
This is the piece that gets overlooked, and it will make or break your training programs. You can design the most thorough, well-structured training and development system in the world. If the managers and mentors responsible for executing it are not prepared, it will fall flat.
This applies to all of your training, not just onboarding, though onboarding is often the place where it matters most because managers are typically the ones helping to train people into their roles. If the organization has never had formal training programs, the people delivering them may need just as much support as the people going through them. Managers need to understand the structure, the timeline, and their specific role in the process. If you are using mentors or buddies, they need clear expectations and resources. None of this should be assumed.
Train the trainers. Build a brief orientation for the people who will be running the program day to day. Give them the tools to do it well and a clear picture of what success looks like. Then build a feedback loop so managers can tell you what is working and what is not. Their observations from the floor are going to be some of the most valuable data you collect, especially in the early stages when you are still refining the program.
Connect Everything Back to What Leadership Cares About
By this point, you should have measurement woven into every layer of what you have built. Discovery gave you the KPIs leadership watches. Compliance work gave you a reporting structure for regulatory requirements. Your LMS is capturing completion, assessment scores, and time to competency. Your knowledge management system is telling you whether people are finding and using what you built.
Now you pull it together into a story.
If leadership is watching time to productivity, show whether structured onboarding is moving that number. If turnover is the concern, track whether a formal onboarding experience changes retention patterns at 30, 60, and 90 days. If customer satisfaction is the priority, look at whether training interventions are moving that score. If compliance completion went from 60% to 92%, that is risk mitigation you can put in front of any executive.
This is how you stop being a cost center and start being a strategic partner — not by talking about the value of L&D in the abstract, but by connecting what you built to the numbers leadership already cares about.
The data you have been collecting from day one makes that conversation possible. Start tracking from the moment you deliver the first piece of content. Completion rates. Assessment scores. Time to competency. Feedback surveys. The sooner you start, the more history you have to point to when someone asks whether any of this is working.
The Bottom Line
Building L&D from scratch at a growing organization is not about moving fast. It is about moving deliberately. The companies that try to skip the analysis, skip the infrastructure, and jump straight to building content end up with a pile of disconnected training materials and no way to measure whether any of it is working.
The ones that invest in the foundation, even when it feels slow, end up with a learning function that scales with them.
And while this post is framed around building from scratch at a growing organization, the truth is that this approach is relevant any time you join an organization, especially as a leader. Whether the company is brand new to L&D or has had a learning function for years, you can walk in, assess what is in place, identify what is working and what needs to be fixed, and use that understanding to make sure you are delivering successfully. The fundamentals do not change. The discovery still matters. The infrastructure still matters. The relationships still matter.
If you are standing at the beginning of this and wondering where to start, start with the analysis. Learn the organization before you try to teach it.
References
Colvin, C. (2024, January 18). Noncompliant workers are a $1.6M liability, study shows. HR Dive. https://www.hrdive.com/news/employee-violations-costly/704938/
CYPHER Learning. (2024). The true cost of rule breakers in workplace compliance. https://www.cypherlearning.com/hubfs/docs/cypher/CYPHER-Learning-2024-Compliance-Report.pdf
Occupational Safety and Health Administration. (2025, January 7). 2025 annual adjustments to OSHA civil penalties [Memorandum]. U.S. Department of Labor. https://www.osha.gov/memos/2025-01-07/2025-annual-adjustments-osha-civil-penalties
