The impact of your methodology choice

From my experience, a professional organization that takes people development seriously will typically encourage and fund their employees for five days of formal training per year. This formal training time could take the form of one five-day course, which is taken over a working week; or it could be split into multiple training days, across multiple months, and across multiple different topics.

There should always be a valid business case to justify a reasonable value and return on the investment for the organization. You should be able to demonstrate a genuine need to attend such training and you should be able to describe to your boss how the training will benefit you and others in the organization.

That's because whatever you want to achieve, a training request is usually subject to your line manager's discretion and approval. If you are managing other people, then you will find yourself on both sides of this equation!

Let's take some learning here from my own work experience. During my graduate scheme days, I did rotations within a consultancy company – so I would regularly change roles. I spent roughly six months as a developer, tester, business analyst, and Project Management Office (PMO) analyst, as well as time working in support and operations.

This was an important stage of my career development because, apart from my university course, this was the first time I had received any formal training as a developer. Even though I was in the graduate scheme, where training is accepted as a big factor, I still had to write a short business case to my line manager to justify learning a programming language!

At the time, this seemed nonsensical to me because I would have genuinely struggled to develop code in a slightly obscure fourth-generation programming language (4GL) called COOL:Gen. And yet, in hindsight, writing that first business case was a valuable lesson.

For obvious reasons, including the prospects of long-term employability, most savvy professionals will prefer formal training, which leads to a professionally and externally recognized qualification. This is something for you to take into consideration as an employee, and as a manager, in a very positive way.

While granting unnecessary training that leads to a qualification will incur a needless cost to your company, there is an additional risk to gauge here which is making other colleagues jealous who may not have had formal training.

I personally don't believe that supporting your team members to gain more qualifications is detrimental to your organization. For me, it's quite the opposite! I always prefer my team members to be well qualified so that the entire team, and therefore the organization, is more skilled and marketable. At the end of the day though, it's a fine balance between finite resources and pertinent needs, which is something you will need to consider as a manager.

Even though it's perhaps a throwaway line, and more of a notion than an actual practice, I particularly admire this mindset and approach from Richard Branson, the founder of the Virgin Group: