If you're just looking to auto-enroll users into courses/programs it's much easier to use a dynamic audience.

If you do need to pre-populate a learning plan (because you want/need the user/manager interaction), I believe the only was to do so is by utilizing competencies.  You would need to:

• Create your "competencies" in a new competency hierarchy 
• Attach courses to each competency
• Attach competencies to position/organization hierarchy
• Create a learning plan template with desired workflow
• Create a dynamic audience to assign out the learning plan

This might be able to help more: https://help.totaralearning.com/display/TL9/Managing+Learning+Plans#ManagingLearningPlans-Competencies 

Hi Peter,

Yip - a dynamic audience, say using a rule based on the user's first login date, would do the trick as far as assigning courses to new Learners. Why exactly do you want to use a Learning plan?

cheers,

George.