The Professional Development Myth That’s Killing Australian Businesses
A few months back, I was sitting in a Brisbane boardroom watching a CEO explain why their star performer just quit. “We threw everything at his growth,” she said, totally confused. “Management programs, skill-building sessions, you name it.””
I’ve heard this story so many times I could write the script. Business spends big on professional development. Employee leaves anyway. Leadership teams sit there confused about where they messed up.
Having spent almost two decades working with organisations from Perth to Brisbane on development strategies, I’ve seen the same pattern repeat itself like a broken record. We’ve reduced professional development to a bureaucratic process that serves everyone except the employees it claims to develop.
The reality that makes everyone squirm: most development initiatives exist to justify HR budgets, not create actual capability.
Here’s what actually grinds my gears: we’re treating professional development like it’s some kind of employee perk. A bonus. Something you throw at people when the annual review comes around and you need to show you care about their “growth journey.”.
Wrong. Dead wrong.
Development should be essential to how every organisation operates. Yet it’s treated as extra, something that can wait until next quarter.
I remember working with a building company in Adelaide where the foremen were technical experts but people management disasters. Instead of addressing this properly, they sent everyone to a standard “Leadership Essentials” program that cost them forty-eight thousand dollars. Half a year later, the same managers were still struggling with the same people problems.
Professional development works fine when done properly. We’re just approaching it arse-about.
Too many organisations begin with assumptions about employee needs instead of asking what people genuinely want to develop. There’s a huge difference between those two things, and it’s costing Australian businesses millions every year.
Real professional development starts with one simple question: what’s stopping you from being outstanding at your job?
Not what your boss thinks you need. Not what the training brochure suggests. What YOU know is holding you back from doing your best work.
I remember working with Sarah, a marketing manager at a Brisbane firm. They kept pushing her toward digital strategy training because leadership believed that’s where she was weak. Sarah’s real struggle was handling her unpredictable boss who shifted direction constantly.
All the social media courses in the world wouldn’t address that challenge. A single discussion with someone who’d managed similar executive relationships? Breakthrough moment.
Here’s where businesses fail in the most complete fashion. They obsess over technical capabilities while the genuine obstacles are interpersonal. When they finally tackle people skills, they use classroom-style training rather than practical guidance and support.
PowerPoint slides don’t teach you how to handle challenging workplace discussions. You build these capabilities through genuine practice with experienced support.
The best professional development I’ve ever seen happens on the job, in real time, with immediate feedback and support. The rest is just expensive corporate theatre.
Here’s another thing that drives me mental: the obsession with formal qualifications and certifications. I’m not saying qualifications are useless – certain positions require particular certifications. But most jobs require capabilities that can’t be certified.
I’ve met marketing leaders without marketing degrees who grasp customer behaviour better than business school graduates. I’ve worked with project coordinators who learned on construction sites and outperform professionally certified project managers.
But we continue promoting structured courses because they’re simpler to track and explain to executives. It’s like judging a chef by their knife collection instead of tasting their food.
The companies that get professional development right understand that it’s not about programs or courses or certifications. It’s about creating environments where people can learn, experiment, and grow while doing meaningful work.
Companies like Google demonstrate this through their innovation time initiatives. Atlassian promotes hackathon events where staff tackle challenges beyond their regular duties. These companies understand that the best learning happens when people are solving actual problems they care about.
Small businesses can establish these development opportunities without huge budgets. Some of the most effective development I’ve seen happens in small businesses where people wear various hats and learn by necessity.
The secret is making it deliberate and planned. Instead of leaving development to chance, smart businesses create stretch assignments, team projects, and mentoring relationships that challenge people in the right ways.
This is what delivers results: combining people with varied backgrounds on genuine business initiatives. The less experienced individual gains insight into fresh obstacles and leadership thinking. The senior person develops coaching and leadership skills. Everyone learns something valuable.
This method is uncomplicated, affordable, and linked to real company performance. But it requires managers who can coach rather than just assign tasks. This is where the majority of companies stumble.
Organisations elevate staff to management based on their job performance, then hope they’ll instinctively know how to grow their teams. It’s like advancing your strongest accountant to accounting supervisor and being shocked when they struggle with team management.
If you want professional development that genuinely develops people, you need to invest in developing your managers first. Not via management seminars, but through regular mentoring and assistance that improves their ability to develop others.
The irony is that the best professional development often doesn’t look like development at all. It looks like interesting work, challenging projects, and managers who care about helping their people succeed.
There’s this Canberra accounting practice where the managing partner committed to giving everyone at least one challenging assignment annually. No official training, no credentials, merely challenging work that expanded people’s abilities.
Their retention rate was amazing. Employees remained because they were developing, discovering, and being pushed in personally meaningful directions.
This is the magic formula: growth connected to purposeful activities and individual passions instead of generic skill models.
Most professional development fails because it tries to be everything to everyone. Better to focus on a few key areas that matter to your individual people in your unique context.
This leads to my greatest frustration: universal development solutions that supposedly work for everyone. These cookie-cutter solutions overlook how people learn distinctively, carry different inspirations, and confront different barriers.
Some people learn by doing. Others prefer to observe and reflect. Some people flourish with public acknowledgment. Others favour private input. Still we funnel everyone through identical training sessions and question why outcomes vary.
Smart companies personalise development the same way they customise customer experiences. They understand that effective approaches for some individuals might be absolutely inappropriate for others.
This doesn’t involve establishing countless distinct programs. It means staying adaptable about how people engage with development options and what those options involve.
Perhaps it’s role variety for someone who develops through action. It might be a study circle for someone who understands concepts better through dialogue. It could be an industry presentation for someone who needs external acknowledgment to gain confidence.
The point is matching the development approach to the person, not forcing the person to fit the approach.
Here’s my prediction: in five years, the companies with the best talent will be the ones that figured out how to make professional development personal, practical, and directly connected to the work that matters.
Everyone else will continue dispatching staff to standard training sessions and questioning why their top talent joins competitors who recognise that excellent people want to develop, not merely accumulate qualifications.
Professional development is not about ticking requirements or meeting learning targets. It’s about creating workplaces where people can become the best versions of themselves while contributing to something meaningful.
Get that right, and everything else – retention, engagement, performance – takes care of itself.
Fail at this, and you’ll keep having those management meetings about why your star performers quit regardless of your major development spending.
Your choice.
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