Lifelong learning begins on graduation day. Four years of education hardly prepares us for a lifetime career in any discipline. There is a significant difference between a career and a job. As a young manager I considered education and training as my responsibility. I almost forced people, but not quite, to continue their education in some form and on some topic of interest to them. I used operational meetings to educate the staff. As our world continues to become more complex, lifelong learning becomes doubly important.

HR departments are generally given the responsibility for education and training, but managers cannot abdicate the responsibility for providing proper educational opportunities. If HR has programs that meet your group's needs, take advantage of them but only after careful evaluation. My major concerns about HR recommendations relate to courses that focus on creativity, team building, performance management, leadership, and that whole class of programs that deal with the soft skills—the interpersonal skills. These courses are absolutely vital but must address real problems with substance. Everyone will not be creative. Everyone will not be a leader. The normal distribution curve will apply. Some small percentage of the staff will drive the group. Too many of these courses teach these interpersonal skills as though the manager lives in a rose garden and only needs to smell the roses.

Education and training that's directed toward the professions requires the manager's scrutiny for relevance to current as well as future organizational needs. Most HR people, unless they have been transplanted from some professional group to HR, are not familiar with the requirements of a particular discipline and cannot possibly make reliable recommendations. They can do a search at the request of the manager and then allow the manager to make the decision. I suggest that you use the HR department to do the search for programs that respond to your department's educational needs, but the final decision lies with you.

Organizations spend billions of dollars annually for education and training. They fund all types of education in many different disciplines and even extend learning opportunities in various types of MBA courses related to technology, marketing, and manufacturing. They also fund internal programs that relate solely to the continued operation of the organization. However, the number of people who invest their personal funds in furthering their work-related education doesn't appear anywhere in the statistics; as an executive, consultant, and educator I seldom encountered an individual who invested personal funds in work-related education and training. So much for lifelong learning. So what do you do as a newly appointed manager?

Learning must emphasize the future. Building a proactive and energetic department that not only serves the present but also anticipates future needs requires that education and training have a high priority. Some of that learning comes from experience as a result of undertaking new challenges and exposure to new ideas, but some formal learning allows the individual to get a head start. As a professional you probably had some number of designated hours allocated for education; forty hours per year seems to be the norm except for special situations, and this is usually verified at the time of appraisal. Forty hours is hardly sufficient to keep abreast of discipline changes or expand to new disciplines unless supplemented with work challenges and stretch targets.

Much of the investment in education and training has little impact on the organization's results. The difficulty with most education and training programs is that they are not linked to current or future work. Managers often state that they don't know what's on the horizon. If they did their job of managing they would keep abreast of the latest in their field through the various professional organizations that serve their field of interest.

While learning is important, it is also often necessary to unlearn what has been learned in the past. This is particularly true in relationship to work methods, processes, and methods of thinking. Unlearning work methods and processes should not present a problem. Some form of logic can be demonstrated to make methods or process changes. But some people will always resist change regardless of the magnitude.

Unlearning old thinking methods does create a problem for many people. This is a difficult transition to make for many specialists. As an example, I stress the need to focus on the impact of any work effort on the total system rather than just the limited piece of the individual's concern. To tear down all those independent silos requires a lot of unlearning. To attempt to capitalize on the application of digital technology requires unlearning old methods. As communications go more toward the electronic a great deal of unlearning and learning must take place. As a paradigm shift takes place old ways must be discarded and new ways implemented. Asking people to think in terms of the impact of their effort on the system is a paradigm shift. What you do in your sandbox must be based on the needs of all those other sandboxes.

You have many resources for educating your staff. Education is available at universities with unlimited specialties, community colleges, industrial training organizations, professional organizations, and now Web-based learning can provide learning in the family living room. People learn differently. Some people make progress in their profession without any formal education and training because of the nature of their work; these are people who work on the cutting edge of their profession. If you and your staff are working on the leading edge you won't have to spend much time and effort benchmarking your efforts against others. You are the benchmark. Some people need formal courses while others learn more by spending a half-day in the library reading related books or scanning the latest related journals published by professional organizations. Lifelong learning is not going to go away. But the benefit from investing in education and training must be measured. Those workshops on creativity that you authorized for your key people really didn't provide any benefit. Don't expect much from any workshop regardless of the presenter's credentials unless followed up with specific opportunities for implementation.