How to ‘Sell’ the Importance of Development

Abstract

The difficulty of selling training and development upstairs has always been the training officer’s greatest problem. Top managers have traditionally been for training or against it, in a quasi-moral sense, but almost all have refused to spend much money, or indeed suffer much inconvenience, for the sake of training. ‘Something else is more important, just now’ is what they say, but that is a thin disguise for their real meaning which is that training has no profit ‘pay-off’. How then can a trainer, or a line manager who wants real attention paying to management development, put over his case and get a proper priority for training?