Personal development - Joint responsibility

It never fails to amaze me how often humans end up digging holes for themselves that they cannot get out of.

Just the other day in the Straits Times, there was an article titled "Personal development is a joint responsibility". You can find the article here.

The author was basically advocating that payment of training courses should go the way of co-payment between employer and employee. He advises that failure to go down this path would see employees relegate themselves to the 'treadmill', where they would be "running but not getting anywhere with personal growth".

Firstly, personal development is a joint responsibility sounds like an oxymoron and that is because it is. The author of that letter has confused personal development with professional development. This is a distinction I've always been keen to keep especially when you're subjected to yearly demands of 100 training hours. I would dearly love to grow as a person, pick up cooking skills, play a guitar or whatever catches my fancy, nevermind the fact that we seldom have time to do so. The idea that we should pay for a company designated training course sits badly with me. Really badly.

In fact, I would argue that if co-payment becomes a reality in training courses, employees would see themselves advance along their professional path and yet see little personal growth.

This just seems like another badly, thought out process - like productivity or economic growth.