“In my opinion, every performance review should include a development goal.”
That quote is by Mike Miller, Senior Director of Learning and Organizational Development at onsemi. It’s from Creating a Culture of Learning: Strategies to Nurture a Thriving Workforce, a recent ATD report sponsored by Zensai.
According to the report, 82% of organizations already consider employee learning in performance reviews. Yet 72% report lacking the resources to build a proper learning culture, with time being the biggest barrier. So, what actually happens when a manager sits down to “consider” learning during a performance conversation without the infrastructure to act on it?
The gap between consideration and connection
Let’s say you’re preparing to conduct a performance review. You open the review template and find you can’t track learning progress. You don’t know what skills they developed, or how they connect to the goals you’ve set over the past several months. Without that context, the conversation gravitates toward deliverables and deadlines. What the employee actually learned never comes up.
Now consider the employee’s experience. They spent weeks completing a course their manager recommended and came prepared to talk about how it connected to their development goal and what they wanted to learn next.
They expected the review to reflect that effort. But when the review arrives, none of that progress is visible. The manager doesn’t mention it because they can’t see it. The employee walks away wondering why they bothered.
Both people invested time, and neither sees the return. Their company is paying for a learning program and a performance review process, but without a connection between the two, neither delivers what it was designed to do. The employee who completed that course is less likely to start the next one.
The manager, meanwhile, has no reason to think anything is missing from the conversation. Every manager running a disconnected review has the same experience. Across the organization, learning programs produce completion numbers and performance reviews capture output, but the employee’s actual growth sits between the two, invisible to both.
It doesn’t have to stay that way. When a manager can see what their employee has been learning, the review becomes a different conversation. The employee who completed that course gets to talk about it. The manager who recommended it gets to build on it.
Where development goals and learning plans belong
Performance conversations are the most underused learning tool in most organizations, but also the easiest to fix. Managers and employees are already in the room together at a regular cadence. The only missing piece is visibility into what the employee is actually learning.
Development goals connected to a weekly check-in change that. When each employee has a personalized goal tied to their learning plan, and that goal is visible in their check-in, the manager sees progress as it happens. Development goals fit naturally into the goal-setting side of check-ins, and managers can respond to any part of them to provide recognition or determine the next steps in a learning plan.
ATD’s Creating a Culture of Learning report found that 79% of organizations provide individual development plans for all or some employees. But a development plan inside an isolated document that nobody visits will only gather dust.
When managers can pull up a development plan while reviewing a check-in or preparing for a review, they use it. The employee sees that their growth matters, and the manager sees where to take the conversation next.
That weekly rhythm is what turns a static development plan into a living one. Instead of revisiting a learning goal once a quarter, the manager is seeing incremental progress every week and responding to it. The employee sees their manager acting on their progress and knows their development is on the radar. Over the course of those weekly check-ins, the plan becomes a roadmap with two people following it.
A manager who tracks that progress walks into the next performance conversation knowing which course was completed and how it connects to the goal they set together. The review becomes a forward-looking conversation about what to learn next.
What the rest of the team sees
A manager reviewing a check-in sees that their report completed a course tied to a development goal. Acknowledging that in the conversation takes no extra time. And because the acknowledgment names what the employee learned and connects it to what they’re working toward, the employee genuinely feels it.
Steve Sorenson, Senior Director of Learning and Culture at Johnsonville, puts it this way: “[Recognizing and rewarding learning] reinforces desired behaviors. If there’s recognition that signals that learning is part of the process and part of what success looks like, it creates positive reinforcement. And it encourages others to follow. If I don’t recognize the reward and effort people are putting in, it becomes a discouragement, and all of a sudden people start opting out [of training].”
According to ATD, 75% of organizations say they reward employee learning, and 63% use public recognition to do it. That’s a strong starting point for visibility. But recognition that happens inside a performance conversation carries a different signal. It tells the employee that their learning connects to their trajectory at the company. And it tells their colleagues that their manager takes development goals seriously.
Other employees notice when their colleagues’ learning gets acknowledged in a performance conversation. It reframes what the team treats as valuable work. When someone sees that completing a course connected to a skills gap earns a real conversation instead of a checkmark on a dashboard, they’re more likely to pursue their own development goals. As that compounds, those goals begin shaping how the team grows.
Sorenson’s point about people “opting out” applies in reverse. Employees who see their colleagues’ development recognized in real conversations pursue their own with more intent, and over time, this shapes what the team considers normal. New joiners see development goals discussed in check-ins and absorb the expectation that learning matters here. That’s the culture of learning ATD describes: one built through everyday performance conversations, visible to everyone on the team.
Use development goals to make the 82% count
Mike Miller is right. Every performance review should include one or more development goals. The 82% of organizations that already consider learning in reviews have the intent. The thread between the development goal, the learning plan, the check-in, and the review doesn’t exist yet.
When that thread exists, the manager preparing for a review can see what their employee learned and the employee walking in knows their growth is visible. The manager then uses that learning data to shape the conversation, and the employee walks out knowing what to learn next.
For the 72% who say they lack the resources to build a learning culture, the answer is closer than they think. They’re already running both processes. Connecting them is the only step left.
Read this article to learn more about the relationship between training and performance, or download the full ATD report, Creating a Culture of Learning: Strategies to Nurture a Thriving Workforce, and explore the state of learning across organizations.
