Andrew Laycock offers an insight into how, as a training manager, he helped managers prioritise training needs.

Assuming your managers have regular development discussions with their employees, a process that I have used successfully in the past was categorising needs in to short, medium and long term.

Short term = needs the training to fulfil their role.
Medium term = Needs the training to move either to next role or to adapt to any future changes in the current role.
Long term = Training for personal development (and possible long term business benefit).

Training courses were always filled with short term needs first, any places left over were for the medium term needs, and if any places were available after this then these were offered to the long term needs with the ones who had been waiting longest taking priority. My target as training manager was to ensure all short term needs were actioned within three months and it was rare with the number of courses that we ran to meet this objective that a person with a long term need would have to wait longer than 12 months before being offered a place.