Are staff at risk of underperforming by not accessing external training and development schemes? In a whitepaper produced by the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), based on a survey of healthcare professionals, found that externally accredited programmes, such as university courses, Charted Manager and professional bodies’ qualifications, yielded far greater return for employee performance than in-house training.
Yet, 86% of health and social care employers favoured development programmes, and on-the-job development (83%), rather than formal qualifications and assessment (74% and 49% respectively). Add this to the evidence from the survey, which found that a third of health and social care line managers are ineffective in their jobs, and it suggests that in-house programmes are inherently less effective than external training and development schemes.
Can the essence of CMI’s whitepaper and the findings from the survey be endemic of organisational culture as a whole? Are we close minded to the benefits that can be gained via externally accredited programmes, opposed to development schemes which we have developed in-house? If this is so, are we effectively able to tackle the organisational culture which in-house training can, and does bring in respect of ineffective managers and leaders? Thus, this would suggest the need to get beyond the rhetoric that learning and development is a “good thing” in its own right!
Therefore, if we consider that externally accredited training and management development programmes are there to improve managers and leaders capabilities, and ultimately organisational ability to perform, then why would we not make this investment?
It could be argued that this goes back to organisational culture, and what we expect, not only from our employees, but from the programmes we hope will develop them. We need to take a step back and understand our organisations fundamentally, where we are going and how we hope to perform holistically. Only by doing this can we really affect change and achieve our desired results.