How to Secure Executive Buy-In for Your 2026 L&D Strategy

Summary:
Securing budget and executive buy-in for learning and development (L&D) is one of the biggest challenges facing HR and L&D leaders in 2026. This article explains how to align learning with business priorities, demonstrate ROI, and communicate with senior stakeholders in a way that builds trust and investment. Discover six proven strategies to make L&D a strategic driver of organisational growth.

Securing budget to achieve your learning and development (L&D) plans is a constant challenge. As internal priorities and external trends evolve at speed, influencing senior management to achieve executive-level buy-in requires a variety of skillsets, not least the ability to demonstrate return on investment (ROI). Despite this, L&D represents a huge opportunity for organisations to empower their people to grow, upskill and keep pace with progressive digital transformation, including the rise of AI.

Having an effective L&D strategy in your organisation is not just an option. It is a core capability, essential to allow employees to adapt quickly, contribute meaningfully to business outcomes and advance their own career prospects. But success isn’t just about providing employees with access to new technologies or AI tools. Technology alone does not create change, people do.

To drive sustainable business growth, organisations should be focusing on mindset rather than on specific tools or technology solutions. This means investing in your people as the key to digital transformation so that you don’t risk falling behind. While early adopters of AI advance rapidly, those more hesitant or resistant to new tools are being left behind, widening a gap that creates risks for the organisation. Time is critical.

Building a successful business case for learning and development

The key to executive buy-in is showing that faster learning drives greater productivity. Build your case by demonstrating that continuous learning is essential for sustaining business performance.

Demonstrating a clear ROI will be critical. Typically, more accurately measured with a narrow scope, such as operational or sales-related training, the ROI of L&D effectiveness depends on multiple variables which can be difficult to isolate.

Here are six key factors to consider when securing your L&D budget:

Focus on a few strategic objectives

Align your L&D priorities with the organisation’s core strategy by identifying a small number of key corporate projects where learning could impact performance and productivity. Highlight:

The benefits: how learning initiatives will improve capability, engagement and productivity.
The risks: what could happen if L&D activities are not implemented, such as skills gaps, project failure or employee disengagement.

Create two-way partnerships

Develop working partnerships between your L&D staff, HR and senior leadership. Gain understanding about their key priorities but also challenge their perspectives when they don’t align. Use these relationships to provide insight into how L&D is not just a support function, but a strategic partner working towards shared organisational goals through an integrated, collaborative approach.

Speak a common language

Use a shared, common language with all relevant stakeholders to connect learning outcomes to business performance. Finance leaders often see L&D as a ‘nice-to-have’ rather than a necessity. Align your messaging with their priorities and business language. Analytics also help change that perception from optional to essential by quantifying the ‘why’ behind your L&D plans.

Use analytics and metrics to demonstrate value

Create robust tracking systems to measure the impact of your L&D projects, including engagement rates, satisfaction, costs and knowledge retention. Executives will also require financial transparency to ensure that funds are used as intended.

Directly linking L&D to revenue can be challenging, but consistent measurement builds credibility over time. Remember ‘you can’t manage what you don’t measure’.

Ensure competent execution

Launching an effective L&D initiative requires people who not only understand strategic implementation but also approach their work with care and commitment.

Competent execution is about care, measurement and continuous improvement. In the past, success of L&D plans may have happened by chance, but in today’s fast-changing environment, there has been a paradigm shift where intentional, competent execution is required to achieve the right results.

Balance the dimensions of learning

Modern L&D strategies must strike a careful balance across individualisation and collaboration, and across the speed of AI technology with the human brain’s requirement for time to digest and reflect.

To achieve this, we focus on three key pillars: community and collaboration, individual motivation, and time. While AI enables personalised learning, it’s the human connection and motivation that remains vital. At the same time, most people learn best through shared experiences and communication. You’ll need to balance these pillars to ensure that learning is truly effective.

Finally, preparation is the essential ingredient

Securing budget and executive buy-in requires you to position L&D as a strategic enabler of business success that drives performance, not an isolated support function in the organisation.

Our expert, Lilia Borrelli, Global HR People Change and Learning Senior Manager for Gi Group Holding, advises, “Engage the right people from the outset and understand what matters to decision-makers. Ask questions to clarify priorities and build mutual understanding. Be ready to strengthen your case with credible data and analytics. And finally, come well-prepared, showing not only the value of learning but how it directly supports strategic execution and business outcomes.”