Your employer doesn’t require you to have any more training than you actually need.

Any training provided to you by your employer will be sufficient for you to perform your assigned role, and no more. What would be the point in anything else?

It’s this way because, money.

From a purely business point of view, it is not cost effective and serves no real purpose to provide employees with training that they are not going to utilise. Which, in all fairness, makes pragmatic sense. Your employer is not obliged to provide you with training you don’t need. So why would they?

The big risk of course in providing extra training to any employee is that, they might expect their pay packet to reflect these extra skills. Which puts the employer in the disagreeable position of having to say no to an employee requesting a nudge up on their pay grade. The end result of this is, the employee finds better paid employment elsewhere, and the employer has to find somebody to replace them. Somebody who might just require training.

Nope. That won’t do at all.

The term “Learning & Development” sure does sound pretty, doesn’t it? But it is in reality, just pyrite masquerading as gold.

Those Health & Safety toolbox talks and updates, count as L&D. You’re learning, and you’re being developed. Has one of the HR ghosts come down to talk to you about something that has the word “awareness” attached to it? That’s learning and development. Tailor made, just for you. As far as the corporate body, the client, and the outside world are concerned, you are receiving “training”.

Picture the “Pyramid of Business”. The executive toilets are at the top and you, are at the bottom. With middle management tripping over their own feet and bumping into the walls in the middle.

The business purpose is to scale up the base of the pyramid, on the x and y axes, whilst the pointy bit at the top remains fixed in position. This is called “expansion”. (Which is not quite the same thing as “growth”.)

Expansion, is easier when the pyramid is built on a foundation of a de-skilled workforce, “on-the-job training”, and subsistence wages with no appreciable pay grading and career development.

The idea that an employee can start out as an apprentice, and subsequently be mentored and groomed for greatness in an orgy of career progression and succession planning, is a quaintly archaic notion that has no place in modern business practice.

Partly because it is not in the company’s interests, and partly because, with the expansion model, there is no longer any “up”.

Your name’s not on the list, you’re not getting in. It could be your face or your social class. It could be who you do, or don’t know. It could be your level of education. It could be the fact that there aren’t that many chairs in the VIP lounge.

But mostly, it’s your face.

It’s not all about the “Old Boy” network, members only clubs, and nepotism.

Your employer is not obliged to pop you into the career development catapult, and fling you over the walls of the management citadel. The fact that they don’t want to, is neither here nor there.

As keen as the privileged are to price the hoi-polloi out of the same further education that they themselves benefitted from, there is nothing stopping you from doing it for yourself. Okay granted, you’re not one of the silver-spoon suckers, blessed with access to mummy and daddy’s money and connections, but that doesn’t make you any less capable. The best education money can buy, doesn’t mean you’re less likely to poke yourself up the nose with a drinking straw because you missed your mouth again. It just means, you have a good education. There’s plenty of dimwits with family money and “old school ties”.

There are other ways. It is not uncommon for management and executive types to gain their own, extra-curricular, qualifications. Online and Adult Education courses are available. Pop over to the resources page on this site and scroll down. As good a place to start as any. All you need is the drive to avail yourself of them.

Beyond that, the only thing stopping you is low wages, long working days, overtime, a lack of free time, increasingly high bills, and family needs and obligations.

If you like what you see when you gaze upon the upper tiers, and want to climb the management ugly-tree until you reach the executive canopy at the top, then what’s stopping you? If you can live with the sacrifices you’ll have to make and what sort of person that will turn you into, then go for it.

Upon achievement of your certification, you can then grant yourself the adjective “professional“ and join the corporate body’s favourite dating app, LinkedIn, and wait to be head-hunted.

The dark side of Learning & Development, is when you are assigned a task that you are not trained in.

Your employment contract will cover this sort of thing. Somewhere in the text will be something akin to “extra duties”. Although it might seem unreasonable to expect employees to perform tasks that they are not trained in, it does, and will continue to, happen.

If, or when, something goes wrong an untrained employee will still be held accountable. Don’t expect your employer to put their hands up and say, “Yep. Our bad. We neglected to train them”, in the event you screw up a task you had not been trained in.

Enjoy the rest of your day.