Stop Calling It Professional Development When Nobody’s Actually Developing
The guy sitting next to me at Officeworks last week was buying fifteen different highlighters and muttering about his “PD plan” for 2025. Made me think about how completely wrong we’ve got this whole professional development thing in Australia.
I’ve been delivering skills training programs for manufacturing teams, corporate suits, and everyone in between for the past eighteen years. Started back when people actually cared about learning stuff that mattered. These days? Half the participants rock up because HR said they had to. The other half are there for the free coffee and to escape their desk for a few hours.
But here’s what gets me properly wound up about this industry. We are calling everything “professional development” when most of it’s just costly paperwork exercises.
Genuine development happens when someone walks away knowing how to do something they didn’t know how to do before. Not when they’ve sat through another PowerPoint about “leadership excellence” or “performance excellence.” Honestly, I hate that word synergy.
Think about my client Dave who runs a plumbing business in Geelong. Smart bloke, employs fifteen tradies, makes good money. He came to me about twelve months ago saying his team needed “soft skills training” because they kept getting complaints about communication. Reasonable request, right?
Wrong approach entirely.
I spent a morning with his crew on actual job sites. Turns out the “communication problem” wasn’t about how they talked to customers. It was about how they explained technical issues to people who didn’t understand plumbing. Entirely different issue.
We didn’t need role playing exercises or communication workshops. We needed hands on translation skills. How do you explain a blocked sewer line to a worried homeowner without making them feel stupid? How do you quote a complicated repair job so people understand what they are paying for?
Six weeks later, customer complaints dropped by 75%. Dave’s business grew because word got around that his team actually explained things clearly.
That’s professional development. Everything else is just expensive time wasting.
The trouble with most skills training programs? They are designed by people who’ve never done the actual job. You get these facilitators fresh out of university with their complex frameworks and abstract models. Not much wrong with theory, but when you are teaching someone how to handle difficult conversations at work, you should have had a few yourself.
l remember this one session I ran for a manufacturing plant up in the Port Kembla region. Operations manager insisted his supervisors needed “workplace harmony training” because they were having issues with contractors. Common stuff, you’d think.
However when I dug deeper, the real issue wasn’t conflict resolution. These supervisors were managing safety breaches and didn’t know how to fix them without creating workplace drama. Entirely different skill set required.
Instead of one size fits all conflict workshops, we worked on documentation, escalation procedures, and how to have accountability conversations that didn’t destroy relationships. Practical stuff they could use immediately.
The generic training business loves selling standardised solutions. Makes me mental. You cannot fix a manufacturing floor communication challenge with the same method you’d use for a marketing team’s collaboration problems. Different contexts, different pressures, different people.
Bunnings gets this correct, by the way. Their staff development and ongoing training programs are targeted, role specific, and actually practical. You are not learning generic concepts about customer service. You are learning how to guide someone pick the right screws for their deck project. Real world, immediate application.
Yet most businesses still book their teams into cookie cutter “workplace effectiveness” or “efficiency enhancement” sessions that have absolutely no connection to their real work challenges.
Here’s my controversial opinion that’ll probably irritate some people : most professional development doesn’t work because we are trying to fix the incorrect problems.
Companies send people to leadership training when the genuine issue is poor systems and processes. They book teams into team building workshops when the problem is unclear role definitions or support constraints. It’s like putting a plaster on a broken leg.
I was working with a transport company in Melbourne a couple of years back. Logistics coordinators were making mistakes, missing deadlines, total chaos. Management wanted group exercises and stress management training.
Dedicated one morning shadowing their coordinators. The “people problem” was actually a software problem. Their logistics system was from the dark ages, requiring countless different steps to process one shipment. No wonder people were frustrated and making mistakes.
No level of professional development was going to fix that. They needed improved software, not better people skills.
But here’s where it gets good. Once they resolved the systems issues, then we could work on genuine skill development. How to manage when everything’s urgent. How to inform delays without making customers lose their minds. How to identify potential problems before they become disasters.
That’s when training actually functions. When you are creating skills on a stable foundation, not trying to mask basic operational problems.
The second thing that kills professional development effectiveness? The complete disconnection between training and genuine work application.
Someone participates in a brilliant workshop on Monday, goes back to their normal job on Tuesday, and by Friday they’ve missed everything because there’s no support structure for applying new skills.
I started requiring on follow up sessions about ten weeks after primary training. Not more theory. Practical problem solving based on what people actually attempted to implement. What was effective, what didn’t, what got in the way.
Outcomes jumped dramatically. People need time to practice new skills in their genuine environment, then revisit and troubleshoot the challenges. Makes perfect sense when you think about it, but most training organisations dont offer this because it’s more work for them.
Australia Post does this properly with their customer service training. Core workshop, then ongoing check ins with managers, then revision sessions based on real experiences. It’s not just a single session event.
The best professional development I’ve ever seen occurred at a independent engineering firm in Wollongong. The owner, Kate, determined her project managers needed better client relationship skills. Instead of sending them to off site workshops, she brought in real clients for honest feedback sessions.
Tough but brilliant. Project managers heard straight from customers about what was working and what wasn’t. Then we created training around those exact issues, Actual problems, workable solutions, immediate application.
Six months later, client retention was up 40%. Not because we taught them fancy techniques, but because they understood what their customers actually needed and how to deliver it dependently.
That’s the gold standard right there. Development that’s tied to real outcomes, measured by concrete results, and constantly improved based on what works in real world application.
Most businesses are still stuck in the outdated model though. Calendar based training budgets that have to be spent by June 30. Generic programs that appear impressive in board meetings but dont generate anything important on the ground.
The tragedy is there are excellent trainers and coaches out there doing incredible work. People who understand that authentic development is messy, ongoing, and deeply contextual. But they are competing against slick sales presentations and glossy training catalogues that promise quick solutions to difficult problems.
If you are responsible for professional development in your business, here’s my advice : start with the real problems your people encounter every single day. Not the problems you think they should have, or the problems that align neatly into standard training packages.
Watch them for a morning. Ask them what bothers them most about their job. Find out what skills they dream of they had to make their work more effective or more effective.
Then design development around that. It might not seem like conventional training. Might be coaching, job shadowing, practical learning, or bringing in consultants to tackle specific challenges.
But it’ll be significantly more worthwhile than another standard workshop about synergy.
Professional development functions when it’s actually professional and actually creates something. Everything else is just overpriced time away from useful work.

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