Building Skills While Doing The Day Job
By Christopher Ward

On the face of it there is no shortage of management training and development going on in Wales today.

In terms of availability, Cardiff Business School estimates that there are approximately 1.600 different providers of management skills development and no fewer that 17,000 different courses on offer.

Add to that the finding of Wales Management Council’s latest survey of development practice which calculates that Welsh-based organisations spend no less than £138 million a year on boosting the capacity of their managers. That translates into a total of half a million training days.

Given that the performance of managers is what drives the economy, this sounds very encouraging if taken purely at face value.

But looking beneath the surface, we find a great swathe of smaller businesses  whose managers badly need skills support but who aren’t getting it right now.

Our survey across all sectors, discovered that 36% of businesses – mainly those employing less than 10 people – undertook no management development at all.

Furthermore only 16% of firms in this size bracket had a specific training budget – in other words that they pre-planned their training. When we looked at firms with up to 50 employees the proportion with training budgets was still only 34%.

Although the dearth of management development was most pronounced among smaller firms it was not confined to that sector. There is evidence among larger firms that management training tended to be focused on a select few of the executive team.

While we shouldn’t be too hasty in flashing a warning sign it is vital that we delve deeper to find out just how healthy or unhealthy Wales’ management development situation is at present.

One conclusion we can draw from the survey is that, while many company owners accept the importance learning for managers, they believe it needs to be aligned more accurately with real business need.

Before investing in management development, small enterprises with scarce resources need to overcome the difficulty of identifying a manager’s specific development needs against the huge range of practical abilities he or she needs to demonstrate every day.

Moreover there is the challenge of finding training that fits seamlessly with business needs, that integrates both on and off the job training and that is easily put into practice in a productive way.

Those running small businesses are not blind to the benefits of management development, but, faced with daily pressures, they want to be sure that when they invest in training it will really count.

Those planning and delivering management development need to do more to convince them.

Christopher Ward is Chief Executive of Wales Management Council