GUEST COLUMN.

Every state and local government executive can name their agency’s biggest workforce threats without hesitation: a retirement wave that’s already underway, a labor market that no longer rewards loyalty, and AI tools arriving faster than anyone can write policy for them.

Fewer of those same executives can say who runs their training function, what that person’s budget buys, or how they’d know if the training is producing measurable results.

If agencies could count on tenure to build institutional knowledge, a mediocre training function could be a tolerable inefficiency. But that inefficiency is no longer tolerable as institutional knowledge is quickly walking out the door.

Agencies absorbing the loss of institutional knowledge without a performance hit are the ones where someone senior treated workforce development as a management lever rather than a compliance line item. That someone is usually a training officer. Most executives have no idea whether their training officer is any good.

A function evaluated on the wrong metrics gets managed to the wrong metrics

Ask a typical training officer how their year went, and you’ll get completion percentages and satisfaction scores. Ask what changed in the agency because of their work, and the conversation gets much harder. That’s not a personal failing. It’s what happens when expectations of more complete measurements never go any further.

This is where accountability runs upward. If a CFO signs off on a training budget every year without ever asking what the return was, or a city manager approves a course catalog built by a committee that no one revisits, the executive has effectively told the training function that activity is the deliverable.

However, training officers who serve as strategic partners can be found in every sector of government. They tend to cluster in agencies where leadership asked them to operate that way and then gave them the authority to do so. These are the training officers who provide a real strategic impact to their organizations.

The real cost shows up somewhere else on the org chart

The consequences of underdeveloped training leadership rarely appear on the training budget line. They show up as extended time-to-proficiency in public safety and licensing functions. They show up in exit interviews citing inadequate onboarding or unclear advancement paths. They show up when a department head quietly builds a shadow training operation because they’ve stopped trusting the central function to meet their needs, duplicating costs and fragmenting quality control.

Executives who have modernized procurement, finance, or IT governance over the past decade already understand this pattern: underinvestment in a support function doesn’t eliminate the cost; it just relocates it to a less visible, harder-to-trace place.

Workforce development has largely escaped that scrutiny, partly because its failures look like other problems: turnover, grievances, service complaints, and error rates. Executives who trace those symptoms back far enough often find an undertrained or insufficiently empowered training function at the root.

Treat training leadership as a talent pipeline, not a fixed role

There’s a second, quieter problem. Many jurisdictions still treat the training officer position as a landing spot rather than a leadership track. Someone with strong subject-matter knowledge is pulled into the role, receives no additional development, and is expected to serve as an internal consultant to every department in the organization without ever being taught how. Executives would never do this to a finance director, but they do it routinely to the people responsible for building everyone else’s capability.

Closing that gap doesn’t require restructuring or new headcount. It requires executives to treat training leadership as they do any other function in which quality determines organizational performance: with clear expectations, real investment in the people doing the work, and direct access to decision-making.

Three actions worth taking this budget cycle

1.     Fund credentialing and peer networks. Sponsor your training officer’s pursuit of a recognized credential, such as those from the Association for Talent Development or the Public Sector HR Association, and their participation in a professional network, such as a state training officers’ consortium. The return isn’t the certificate. It’s exposure to how peer jurisdictions solve the same problems, which your training officer can adapt for your organization.

2.     Add a workforce-capability metric to your dashboard. Pick one number tied to actual performance, such as time-to-proficiency in a high-turnover role or post-training error rates. Require it to be provided in the same reporting cycle as your financial and operational metrics. What executives measure at their level is what gets noticed at the lower levels.

3.     Give your training officer a standing seat at operational planning, not just in HR meetings. If they’re not in the room when service changes, technology rolls out or restructuring is discussed, they’re building capability after the fact rather than ahead of time. That seat costs nothing and changes what the role can accomplish.

None of this requires a bigger budget. It requires executives to stop treating the people who build their workforce’s capability as a line item and to start treating them as the strategic function they are.

The contents of this Guest Column are those of the author, and not necessarily Barrett and Greene, Inc

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