Skills training at work: It really begins with managers, not HR

I have never, for the life of me, understood the Gartner HR practice. They write all these long, flowery articles about work for Harvard Business Review and other places, and each time I see one, it seems like not a soul who works there actually understands work at all. Logically per their function, they interview a lot of HR leaders about heady, future-looking work issues. All that begs the question: why? HR leaders tend to know nothing about the future of work, and honestly, a lot of them can barely explain how their current company makes money, or what products/services they provide. They exist as a pressure release valve for the execs; they get in the mud with bad hires so that execs don’t have to pay lawyers except for the big topics, and they provide air cover for managers.

The biggest place that HR provides air cover for managers is hiring, but the second biggest place is learning and development, which somehow became a HR function at many places, even though the people who tend to enter HR have absolutely no business trying to guide the learning process of others. That has to come from managers and self-aware people who are comfortable becoming mentors. It cannot come from HR.

Putting 2 and 2 together now, here’s another new long article from Gartner about dynamic learning. This article is totally…