How to make time for tailored learning and development
From stretch roles to protected time, here are the tactics for embedding L&D into your workflows and culture.
The greatest obstacle to sustained professional growth among comms teams isn’t budget or buy-in— it’s the feeling that what’s offered doesn’t feel personalized or visible to leadership.
When the 2025 Ragan Salary and Workplace Culture Survey asked hundreds of communicators across industries and seniority leaders what they wanted most from professional growth opportunities, a few themes emerged:
- Personalization: Many communicators seek development plans that reflect their unique roles and aspirations, rather than off-the-shelf trainings.
- Visibility and sponsorship: Respondents want opportunities that bring them into contact with senior leadership, cross-functional teams or potential sponsors.
- Advancement clarity: They also want transparency. What skills will get them promoted? What does the next level look like?
Time is another obstacle that leaders often cite in our conversations. Many have detailed learning plans, but repeatedly find those plans take a backseat to the most urgent business need of the week.
This is a symptom of the same ailment that plagues many comms teams—at the crossroads of business functions, communicators are too busy putting out the fires of others to learn how to extinguish the fires on their own.
Cat Colella-Graham, Ragan Training instructor and communications professor at New York University, believes that we become strategic advisors when we prioritize our team’s L&D as a non-negotiable part of organizational culture. But that can only happen when leaders are intentional, curious and vocal about it.
“We’re so used to being firefighters,” Colella-Graham said, “but adopting a more reflective rather than responsive approach helps us move more deliberately.”
Here are her top strategies and tactics for ensuring your team, and fellow leaders, make time to grow.
- Become an early adopter of technologies to treat them as learning platforms.
When Colella-Graham took Martin Waxman’s Ragan Training session on AI content creation, it reminded her that when comms leaders are willing to be students, they also model why being a lifelong learner matters.
In this case, she learned how tools like Claude prioritize owned and original content in their outputs: “It never even occurred to me that engineering your search process really does matter,” she said. “Going to multiple sources really matters. I learned things I never knew.”
- Create stretch opportunities that transcend job descriptions.
Colella-Graham defined stretch opportunities as a nontraditional type of experiential learning that partners communicators with other departments intentionally.
“Somebody needs a project done,” she explained. “Maybe you have Excel skills, PowerPoint skills, or something else—they’ll pull you in. That’s how you get to know people, learn other layers of the organization, and grow as a person.”
This creates the visibility and sponsorship that many communicators aren’t getting from their current L&D programs. “Stretch opportunities happen,” she continued. “You just have to let your manager know. And that’s another way of learning.”
- Institutionalize learning time—then model it.
Recalling her recent time at an AI-powered tech company, Colella-Graham shared how L&D time was normalized and modeled by leadership.
“Thursdays between one and three were learning time, and no other meetings were allowed,” she explained. “The CEO would write in his monthly newsletter, ‘This month, here’s how I spent my Learning Zone time.’”
“If he’s not too busy to do it, none of us are too busy to do it. It was a statement.”
But even more compelling: “They put the number of learning hours in their quarterly earnings reports. Let me tell you, investors were like, ‘Well, damn.’”
- Celebrate learning with personalized recognition.
“Employees love to be recognized,” Cat said. “They love to see their name in a newsletter or on LinkedIn. All they need to answer is one sentence: ‘This is what I did with my learning this month, and this is what I gained from it.’”
There’s no need to overengineer this, she continued, and you can simplify the process by pairing that prompt with a visual. “A quote card—with their photo and title on the left, the quote on the right. Canva can do it.”
- Link learning to performance reviews and promotions.
Elsewhere in the Ragan Salary Survey, most communicators (80%) reported receiving a formal performance review from their manager in the past year. But only 8% of communicators found their review to be “very useful” in their career development. The majority (42%) selected “somewhat useful,” while nearly a third viewed their review as unhelpful: 20% rated it “not very useful,” 11% said “not useful at all,” and 1% felt it was actively detrimental. Meanwhile, 18% did not receive a review at all.
These numbers suggest a disconnect between the intent and impact of performance reviews. “If you don’t merit learning in annual reviews or promotion pathways, it’s hard to show the value,” Colella-Graham said.
Her philosophy is simple: “What gets measured gets done.”
- Teach Me, Teach You: Make space for peer learning.
At her past firm, Colella-Graham launched a series called “Teach Me, Teach You” that paired junior staff and new team members to exchange knowledge in a two-way learning experience. “Instead of doing the virtual coffees, we did this,” she recalled. “And it was so much better.”
This not only encouraged reverse mentoring but gave junior staff a sense of purpose and ownership. “I created that framework so people would feel empowered to learn from each other in a way that actually served the work,” added Colella-Graham.
- Ask questions that build momentum and motivation.
When coaching managers on sustainable growth, Colella-Grahm starts with human questions: “What motivates them? What scares them? What do they want to move toward?”
This is another means to normalize it from the jump. “Everyone has something to learn,” she said. “The social bravery of saying, ‘I’m still learning’ has to be okay.”
Sign up for your free trial to Ragan Training today with no obligation and take Colella-Graham’s course on employee recognition during times of change!
