By Max Langosco
January 22, 2025
There, I’ve said it. No more beating around the bush. No more embarrassed navel-gazing. I am not even going to try to convince anyone why they should invest in professional development. Not only would a Google search offer more insight than I care to share here, but if a CEO doesn’t get it, they shouldn’t be CEO. Heck, they shouldn’t even be in the company. Period.
So here goes: Corporations are investing less and less in development. Professionals who aren’t employees of multinationals can’t afford quality professional development. And those employees who do get professional development often find themselves subjected to low-quality programs (sold for gold). Trainers who are embarrassed by their own slides stand in front of rooms, reading them out loud. We have fossilized the professional development business and are doing an exceptionally poor job delivering value.
It’s shameful how professional development is neglected, and yet these same -undeveloped- professionals are expected to be “agile,” “lean,” and “adaptable” to ever-changing customer needs, environments, and/or management fads!
Enough is enough! The time has come to say: BASTA! The business of professional development, as it exists today needs to die.
Professional development isn’t even a choice. Either you are growing, or you’re on your way out. Standing still is not an option.
And let’s get one thing straight: including mandatory safety training into the same category as professional development is absurd. Listen up: teaching employees to use a fire extinguisher is not development. Sure, it’s essential, but it’s not growth. If you’re spending half of your development budget on mandatory safety training: you’ve effectively halved your actual development budget. Safety training belongs in its own category—handled by a different team. Enough complaining. Let’s talk solutions.
The Responsibility of Leadership
Here’s the thing: CEO incentives should be directly tied to the growth of employee value. It is the CEO’s responsibility to leave behind employees who are more skilled, more knowledgeable, and more valuable than they were when the CEO arrived. This should be a no-brainer.
Yet how many CEOs are incentivized to do this? Very few. And I’m not just talking about monetary incentives (though those never hurt). Reputation matters too. A CEO who leaves a weaker workforce behind should never get another shot at leading a company.
But here’s the kicker: we don’t even have a widely acknowledged way to measure employee value.
Measuring Employee Value
Measuring and growing employee value should become one of HR’s top priorities. This needs to be done on two levels:
- Individually – By evaluating each employee’s unique contributions and potential.
- Holistically – By assessing entire departments, areas, and organizations.
The second is easier. Organizations can monitor how well they’re nurturing their talent through regular maturity assessments. This approach highlights systemic gaps and opportunities for improvement.
The individual evaluation? That’s trickier. It might even push the boundaries of ethics and privacy. But we need to shift focus from evaluating results (a backward-looking metric) to assessing potential (a forward-looking one).
This might sound counterintuitive in an era where employees hop between companies every few years, but if we’re serious about building long-term value, the loyalty between companies and employees must be restored.
Future-Oriented Employee Evaluation
A future-looking evaluation would consider factors like:
Corporate Resilience:
- How many different types of projects can the employee’s current skill set be applied to?
- When placed in a project, how broadly can the employee contribute outside their core area?
Individual Potential:
- Leadership potential.
- Innovation orientation.
- Self-learning ability (the intrinsic drive to grow).
- Adaptability to change.
- Collaboration and teamwork.
- Emotional intelligence.
- Technological agility.
- Strategic thinking.
Fixing the Ecosystem
So, what’s the way forward? Here’s a plan:
- Shift the Mindset: Stop treating professional development as a cost. It’s not a budgetary line item—it’s an investment in the future of the company.
- Customize Development: One-size-fits-all training doesn’t work. Programs must be tailored to the individual needs and aspirations of employees.
- Leverage Technology: AI and online platforms can deliver high-quality training at scale, enabling personalized learning paths and real-time assessments.
- Redefine Success Metrics: Stop measuring success by training hours or course completions. Instead, track skill acquisition, on-the-job application, and career progression.
- Create a Culture of Learning: Professional growth must become part of the company’s DNA. Leaders must set the tone by prioritizing their own development and encouraging it across teams.
- Separate Safety Training from Development: As already mentioned: safety training is important, but it’s not development. Keep the budgets separate.
The Call to Action
It’s time for organizations—and their leaders—to embrace their moral and practical duty to invest in professional development. This commitment must be part of the corporate strategy, measured rigorously, and celebrated as a core driver of success.
Professional development is not a luxury, a perk, or an afterthought. It is necessary in the long-term corporate self-interest, i.e.: corporate sustainability. Corporations should see this strategic interest and defend the right of professional development for all. It is a human right. No less.
Senior Trainer at International Institute for Learning, Inc.
Max Langosco is a change and risk focused project, program, and portfolio management expert, with over twenty years of experience in developing project management, and in recovering troubled projects in high stress complex contexts. A natural team player, Max brings an agile, value focused approach to complex management, and to driving change.
His focus areas in project management relate to both operational and management. On the operational slide, Max leads change management, troubled projects, complexity, project kick-off, and blending traditional and agile approaches. On the management level, he specializes in systems thinking, deployment of PMO, evaluating project management maturity, transitioning to an agile mindset, and developing and following up maturity road maps.