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Overcoming Career Plateaus Through Targeted Training
What's Actually Wrong With Corporate Training Programs (And the Three Things That Actually Work)
Look, I'm going to be completely honest about the garbage that passes for professional development in today's world. I've been running training workshops across Melbourne, Sydney, and Brisbane for the past close to 20 years, and frankly? About 78% of what I see makes me want to bang my head against a wall.
A few weeks back I attended what they called a development program that cost my customer more than most people's monthly salary. That's serious cash. For what? 48 hours of corporate buzzword bingo and role playing exercises that made grown executives do things that would embarrass a kindergartener. Trees! I'm not making this up.
Here's what nobody wants to tell you about professional development training. The majority is built by folks with zero real world experience, run a business, or dealt with real workplace drama. They've got their fancy certificates from institutes I've never heard of, but ask them to manage a difficult conversation with an underperforming employee? Complete silence.
The Real Problem Nobody Talks About
The development world is strangely obsessed with making everything complicated. I was at a conference in Perth last year where a presenter spent an hour and a half explaining a "revolutionary new framework" for giving feedback. Hour and a half! It boiled down to: tell people what they did, when they did it, and be decent. That's it. But somehow they'd turned it into a complicated method with acronyms and flowcharts.
The lack of follow through drives me mental. Companies spend serious money on these courses, everyone agrees passionately during the sessions, takes their little workbooks back to the office, and then... crickets. The workbooks end up in filing cabinets with other forgotten documents and USB cables that don't fit anything anymore.
One company down south who spent twenty three grand on communication skills training for their management team. After 26 weeks, their employee satisfaction scores had actually dropped. Why? Because the training taught them to speak in corporate buzzwords instead of just speaking like actual humans.
What really makes my blood boil. When I bring this up with other trainers, everyone says I'm right, but then they continue using the same providers who deliver the same recycled content. It's like we are all trapped in some sort of corporate training time loop.
The Things That Create Real Change (Hint: It's Simpler Than You Think)
After watching hundreds of programs succeed and fail spectacularly, I've figured out that only a few key elements actually stick. Everything else is just expensive entertainment.
What works best: people learning from people. Not the formal mentoring schemes where someone gets assigned a mentor they've never met and they awkwardly meet for coffee once a month. I'm talking about getting small groups of colleagues from similar roles together regularly to actually solve real issues they're facing right now.
I set one up for operations managers in manufacturing companies around western Sydney. No PowerPoints or worksheets, just pizza and honest conversations about the stuff that keeps them awake at 3am. They've been meeting for nearly half a decade. Four years! That's longer than most marriages last these days.
The group tackled everything from handling problematic contractors to keeping people connected while working from home. Actual challenges, practical answers, measurable results. Someone in the network figured out how to reduce his team's overtime by nearly half just by adapting what another member had tried six months earlier.
Second thing : job shadowing with people who are genuinely skilled in their field. Not job shadowing with whoever happens to be available that Tuesday, but with people who've truly excelled in their area.
I set up a connection between a marketing professional to spend three days with the head of marketing at one of Australia's biggest companies. Three days. She learned more about running marketing programs and managing relationships than she had in two years of formal training. The Qantas executive loved it too because it forced her to examine her own decision making approach.
Getting the combination right is crucial. You can't just match anyone with anyone. But when you nail the combination? Amazing things occur.
The final approach that works: project based learning where people have to implement something new while they're learning it. Not fake scenarios or ancient case studies that aren't relevant, but real projects with real consequences.
I collaborated with a finance company where we identified actual workflow improvements each participant could make in their role. They spent the training course building those improvements, getting feedback from colleagues, refining, monitoring results. By the end of the course, they'd already solved real improvements and could see the results in their daily work.
Where Most People Mess Up
I know this seems contradictory, but typical programs are overly ambitious. They want to completely reshape someone's entire leadership style in a weekend. It's absolutely mental.
Real transformation occurs when people focus on one specific skill and practice it until it becomes second nature. Like really automatic, not just until they can recall to do it when they're thinking about it.
I had one executive who was hopeless at giving constructive feedback. Instead of putting her through standard development courses, we concentrated solely on feedback conversations. She practiced the same basic structure until she could do it instinctively Three months later, her team's performance had increased substantially, not because she'd become a brilliant boss immediately, but because she'd mastered one crucial skill properly.
Another issue that annoys me is the obsession with psychological assessments. Myers Briggs, DISC, Enneagram, colour profiling. Companies throw thousands on these things, and for what? So people can say "I'm a red personality, that's why I struggle with presentations" and use it as an excuse to avoid challenging conversations?
They're not entirely useless, self awareness is important. But these tests often become crutches instead of tools for growth. I've seen teams where people won't collaborate because their personality types supposedly don't match. It's astrology for company people.
Let's Talk ROI
We need to discuss financial returns because that's what genuinely important. Typical programs have no way to track results beyond "happy sheets" and participation numbers. It's like rating a movie by how many people stay until the end instead of whether the content was valuable.
Effective training tracks real changes and measurable results. Real numbers, not fuzzy feelings. Those colleague networks I described? They track real challenges overcome and efficiency gained. Those workplace observation programs? We measure skill improvements through 360 degree feedback and regular evaluations.
An industrial organisation calculated that their colleague network saved them over a third of a million dollars in its first year through operational improvements alone. That's a solid return on the cost of periodic catering and space rental.
What It All Means
Look, I don't have all the answers. I've made lots of errors over the years. I once created a leadership program that was so tedious I fell asleep during my own presentation. Not joking. The customer never called back.
But I've learned that the best professional development happens when people are tackling real challenges with real consequences, learning from people who've actually done what they are trying to do, and focusing on specific skills they can practice until they become completely natural.
All the other stuff? It's just expensive theater that makes executives feel like they're supporting their teams without actually creating real improvement.
I might be overly critical. Possibly those team building exercises actually work for some people. But after nearly two decades of watching companies invest in development that doesn't last, I'd rather spend the budget on things that actually make a difference.
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