The Economist recently carried a story “Can the ed-tech boom last?” Since COVID, online learning for schools and pupils has boomed, and some well-placed start-ups are now decacorns – a unicorn is a start-up with a $1B valuation, a decacorn has a $10B valuation.

While most of the article covers school and university age learning, it notes that some of those benefitting are in the adult learning sector:

Remote working has made more roles plausible to more jobseekers, giving them more reason to reskill. At the same time, a flurry of job-switching in Britain and America has made big employers nervous. They are becoming more convinced that spending on staff training can help them hang on to workers and cut the cost of plugging holes.

They mention companies like Coursera, Guild and BetterUp which provide new skills for staff.

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Why training managers is even more important

What the writer is missing is that large employers concerned about staff retention should be as much concerned about management training as about staff skills. For one thing, 70% of people who leave roles do so because of dissatisfaction with their Manager. Better managers mean more human workplaces, something we know people want more than ever. Lockdown has opened their eyes to the possibilities of great work-life balance and a more satisfying workplace. Managers need new and better soft skills to manage today’s staff the way they want to be led.

Second and more subtle is the impact on managers themselves: training is just as important as a mechanism for keeping managers in their role – they’re a greater risk than staff members. When a staff member departs they leave, as The Economist says, a hole to be plugged. When a manager leaves, they leave lots of little holes: their staff lose their sense of direction and priority.  Their overall effectiveness and productivity drops. We’ve seen this in numerous places lately – the teams drift while the organisation finds a new captain.

Investing in management training has a multiplier effect – directly on the manager and indirectly on the staff they lead.

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