How to Prioritize and Spend Your FY27 Training Budget

Ask capture and proposal professionals where to spend training budgets first, and you’ll get a different answer this year than last year. AI training still leads, but by a narrow margin. Meanwhile, capture management nearly tripled, from 13% to 37%, and now sits two points behind it.

That reversal is the story of FY27. GovCon has just closed a demanding FY26 proposal season; the disruption of the past two years has settled into a new normal, and capture and proposal leaders finally have room to plan, rather than react. Setting the training budget is the first real planning decision of the next fiscal year.

What the Training Budget Polls Show

In September 2025, Lohfeld Consulting asked its LinkedIn community a direct question: where should companies focus their training budgets first? Then we asked the same question again in September 2026 to determine what, if anything, changed among the 185 original Capture and Proposal community respondents. Table 1 presents our findings.

Table 1: How Priorities in Training Budgets Changed

Why AI Training Tops the Training Budget Again

Once again, the largest percentage of respondents put AI training first for the second year running. But that number has dropped from 45% to 38%, likely because capture and proposal professionals have become more comfortable using AI. At the same time, we also found federal buyers are increasingly adopting AI-assisted acquisition tools. These tools help them parse submissions for compliance, structure, and evidence, rewarding writers who produce specific, quantified, criteria-aligned content, as described in our article, How AI Acquisition Tools Are Reshaping Government Contract Bids.

While AI training remains a budget priority, we also learned how companies are training staff to use AI. When we polled 160 capture and proposal community respondents and asked: How do you primarily keep up with AI advances in bid and proposal work? We found that 60% learned AI through self-study, 21% through peer and community learning, 16% through formal courses and training, and 3% hadn’t started learning about AI to date.

While AI use is becoming increasingly popular, the understanding of how to use it may vary across individuals within companies, given the high percentage of self-study. Therefore, we urge companies to implement AI training that includes:

• Prompt discipline: Writers learn to supply source material, evaluation criteria, and voice constraints that produce usable drafts instead of generic prose.
• Data hygiene: Teams learn to prepare clean, current past performance and resume content so AI has accurate material to work from.
• Security and handling rules: Staff learn which content may enter which tool—a requirement for any contract involving sensitive or controlled information.
• Verification and bias habits: Reviewers learn to check every AI-generated claim, statistic, and citation against a source before it reaches a color review, and to assess statements for bias.
• Capture and proposal-specific application: Generic prompt-writing courses teach syntax, while proposal-specific AI training teaches your team to build compliant, scoreable content under deadline pressure. Click here for a description of Lohfeld’s AI for Proposal Professionals class.

Capture Management Training Is the Gap Worth Funding

Capture management training rose dramatically from 13% to 37%, and this shift is worth noting. This shift may reflect that many companies laid off capture professionals in 2025 and early 2026 and hired new capture managers as government funding stabilized. Also, the dramatic shifts in government, including executive orders, the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR) Overhaul, or agency policies, require a new understanding of how to capture government contracts. Refer to Lohfeld’s blog, FY27 Budget Watch: Where the Money Is (and Isn’t) Headed, for an overview of where the government is planning to spend money in FY27 and how that might impact the capture.

Proposal Writing Training Protects Your Score

Proposal writing training decreased from 27% to 16%. However, workforce changes across the past two years left many companies staffing proposals with technical experts who write clearly for engineers, but poorly for evaluators. Subject matter expertise does not convert itself into scoreable content.

Proposal writing training closes that gap faster than hiring does. Writers learn to lead with strengths, quantify benefits, follow Section L instructions precisely, and answer Section M criteria in the evaluator’s own language. Lohfeld’s Strength-Based Winning^® approach teaches teams to identify and substantiate the strengths an evaluator can score—a skill that separates a compliant proposal from a competitive one.

Business Development Training Feeds Everything Upstream

Business development training drew 15% in 2025, placing it third, but ranked last at 9% in 2026. Pipeline quality sets the ceiling on every downstream result, so thin business development skills produce a pipeline full of bids the company cannot win. Training here concentrates on customer engagement, NAICS code strategy, market research, and qualification discipline. Budget for business development training even when the team is small.

Lean teams feel this most acutely. Companies without a dedicated business development function ask capture managers to carry both roles, and cross-training is the only practical way to make that workable.

Recommendations for Setting Your FY2027 Training Budget

Treat the poll as a starting point for your training budget, then adapt the plan to the gaps your own team carries into FY27:

1. Audit skills against your FY27 pipeline. List the vehicles and recompetes you plan to pursue, then identify the specific skills each one requires.
2. Fund AI training for everyone who touches a proposal. Include capture managers, writers, reviewers, and desktop publishers, because inconsistent AI use across roles creates rework.
3. Send one capture manager to training in every business unit. Capture training compounds across every bid that unit pursues.
4. Send writers to structured proposal writing training. Prioritize training for staff who moved into proposals from technical roles during the past two hiring cycles.
5. Schedule training between proposal peaks. Late fall and early spring give teams the attention that good training requires.
6. Measure the return. Track win rate, evaluator-cited strengths, and rework hours before and after training so that next year’s training budget rests on evidence.

The Bottom Line

Two years of poll results deliver a clear message: practitioners already know what their teams need, and AI training, proposal writing, capture management, and business development skills all belong in the FY27 training budget. Companies that fund training now will enter FY27 with teams ready for a market that rewards precision, while a deferred training budget shows up later as lost bids. Lohfeld Consulting Group provides AI training for proposal professionals, modern proposal writing, capture management, Strength-Based Winning^®, and more. Contact us to build a training plan matched to your FY27 pipeline.

Continued Reading

Build your FY27 training plan with these Lohfeld resources:

• How AI Acquisition Tools Are Reshaping Government Contract Bids: Federal buyers are deploying AI tools that assess proposals for structure and evidence before a human evaluator even reads a page. This article explains nine ways those tools change proposal development and what your team must do differently to score well.
• How Solo Proposal Professionals Can Build an AI Proposal Engine: Lean teams need AI to extend capacity without sacrificing quality, and this article shows how. It covers data preparation, persistent AI workspaces, and workflow integration that holds up under deadline pressure.
• 10 Essential and Emerging Skills Every Proposal Professional Should Have: Use a skills inventory that pairs naturally with your training budget planning to audit your team against both foundational competencies and the emerging capabilities that distinguish competitive proposal shops.

By Brenda Crist, Vice President at Lohfeld Consulting Group, MPA, CPP APMP Fellow

Lohfeld Consulting Group has proven results specializing in helping companies create winning captures and proposals. As the premier capture and proposal services consulting firm focused exclusively on government markets, we provide expert assistance to government contractors in Capture Planning and Strategy, Proposal Management and Writing, Capture and Proposal Process and Infrastructure, and Training. In the last 3 years, we’ve supported over 550 proposals winning more than $170B for our clients—including the Top 10 government contractors. Lohfeld Consulting Group is your “go-to” capture and proposal source! Start winning by contacting us at www.lohfeldconsulting.com and join us on LinkedIn, Facebook, and YouTube^(TM).