What is the most challenging: to recruit, introduce, engage, and retain new project managers? and why?

Stephen R. Covey once said “I am convinced that although training and development are important, recruitment and selection are much more important.” Let’s explore both parts of this advice, starting with the former. Make no mistake ongoing training and professional development are important. However, many organisations fail to optimise their return from investment as they ignore to ask their employees two critical questions following any training and development opportunities. That is, what did you learn from the course and/or training and how will you apply this newfound knowledge to your role or more importantly, what will you do differently to demonstrate this knowledge.

With the latter, recruitment and selection is equally important particularly to bring new skills, knowledge and experience not currently available within the organisation. However, the solution in finding (and keeping) the right skills is to train and develop them from existing internal people talent as the best employees are made, not found particularly in terms of culture fit and employee engagement.

It’s no secret that business success today revolves largely around people particularly in a growing digital environment. Success, therefore, in a people oriented organisation comes from hiring the right people and putting in place learning and development processes that makes them productive. Noting that recent Gallup State of the Global Workplace report found that 85% of employees are neither engaged or actively disengaged at work. Like Sir Richard Branson once said “Train people well enough so they can leave, treat them well enough so they don't want to