Have you noticed how every job posting today demands “proven experience”? As if nobody could be born ready for a role the company itself never bothered to teach. As if learning on the job had become a luxury from another era, something your grandfather used to talk about, walking into a factory knowing nothing and walking out twenty years later knowing everything.

Every week I hear the same sentence from exhausted managers, worded differently each time: there’s no good talent out there. And I listen, and I partly agree, because yes, some positions demand a very specific trajectory, seniority that cannot be improvised, know-how that takes years to mature. But when that sentence becomes a permanent excuse, when it comes out of almost every mouth running a team, something more serious is happening. And that something is not out in the market. It is sitting right at home.

I keep picturing a small, almost domestic scene. A couple decides not to teach their kid how to cook because there’s never enough time, and years later, once that kid is grown, they complain he only knows how to order delivery. He wasn’t born incapable. He simply never had anyone stand next to him in the kitchen long enough to show him the right texture of rice, why you sauté before adding water, the smell that warns you garlic is about to burn. A company that stops developing its people is doing exactly that, just at corporate scale, with a turnover report handy to justify its own absence.

There was a time, and it wasn’t that long ago, when joining a large company also meant enrolling in a school. You started in a simple role, someone more experienced stayed by your side, corrected you without humiliating you, explained the why before demanding the how. A person didn’t just fill a vacancy. They built a path inside that place, and the company invested in that path because it knew its next generation of leadership would come from exactly there.

Today you join a company the way you sign up for a streaming service. You pick the content, you watch it alone, nobody checks whether you actually understood it. There are learning tracks, modules, certificates, gamification, all very polished on screen. And quietly, an army of professionals grows who can ace any training quiz and have no idea what to do in their first difficult conversation with a furious client.

It isn’t that the platforms are useless. They teach content. What they don’t teach is presence.

Presence is the manager who sits beside you at seven in the morning before the rush starts and shows you, in practice, why that report needs to be read backward before any decision gets made. Presence is the minute of silence a leader holds before answering, so you have to think first instead of getting a ready-made answer. Presence is trusting someone with a responsibility bigger than they’re fully prepared for, and staying close enough that the mistake becomes learning, not a firing.

And here lies the part nobody says out loud: the manager who should be doing this is so drowning in urgency that he has lost the right to spend time teaching. He walks into one meeting, out of another, puts out fires, chases numbers, sits through yet another meeting about the previous meeting, and by the end of the day realizes he went eight hours without truly looking at anyone on his team. Developing people became the agenda item that always gets pushed to next week, bumped by whatever urgency shows up first.

I picture a traffic officer watching a jammed intersection. He can stand there yelling at every car that stalls, honking, cursing whoever doesn’t know how to drive. Or he can notice the problem isn’t each driver’s individual skill. Nobody ever explained how that specific intersection actually works, and every car is guessing the logic on its own. A company that hunts for ready-made talent out in the market is doing just that: yelling at traffic instead of rethinking the intersection.

There’s a comfortable illusion behind this constant preference for hiring from outside. The illusion that bringing in someone already formed is faster, cheaper, less risky. And for the first month it does look that way. Six months later, that polished new hire discovers the internal culture is confusing, nobody explains processes clearly, managers are too busy to mentor, and he starts eyeing the next company willing to pay a bit more. The cycle restarts. The company spends on recruitment what it should have invested in development, and keeps swearing the problem is a shortage of talent in the country.

It isn’t scarcity. It’s waste.

I once worked with an organization suffering from frightening turnover in an entire operational area. Leadership insisted the local market simply didn’t have qualified people for that role. We went to look closely at what happened in a new hire’s first month. Nobody patiently explained the reason behind each procedure. They handed over a manual, expected productivity within a week, and labeled as incapable anyone who didn’t perform at full speed from day one. The city wasn’t short on talent. It was short on someone willing to teach before demanding.

There’s also a quiet vanity hiding behind this preference for outside talent. Developing someone from within requires humility. It requires the manager to accept that this professional, once ready, might become as good as he is, or better. Hiring from outside, already polished, avoids that discomfort. The newcomer arrives with a spotless résumé, no history inside the company, not enough closeness to challenge old decisions. Easier to control. And control, let’s be honest, often outweighs growth on the scale of decisions made by someone leading from insecurity.

A company that only knows how to buy ready-made talent is, in practice, saying it doesn’t trust its own capacity to develop people. And that matters, because human development was never just one department’s job with a nice title on the org chart. It belongs to whoever stands next to the team every single day, watching the work happen, able to correct course before a mistake becomes a loss, and just as able to celebrate a win before it slips by unnoticed.

HR can design the best learning-track program in the world. It can hire the most expensive consultants, buy the latest platforms, build a corporate university with an impressive name. None of it replaces the manager willing to sit next to someone and say, let me show you how I do this, not because it’s the only right way, but because it’s a way that works, and you’ll build your own from here.

Maybe the problem isn’t a lack of talent in the market. Maybe it’s a lack of patience at home.

And patience, in today’s corporate world, has become a luxury item. Nobody has time to make a mistake without getting called out instantly. Nobody has time to learn slowly when this quarter’s target isn’t waiting. Nobody has time to teach when survival in the manager’s chair depends on delivering numbers, not on developing people.

I keep wondering what would happen if, for one whole quarter, a company stopped counting how many positions it filled with outside talent and started counting how many internal people moved up, how many managers genuinely stopped to teach, how many mistakes became learning instead of a quiet dismissal. It would probably discover that the talent it had been hunting for out there was sitting the whole time in the chair right next to it, waiting for someone to notice.

This isn’t about abandoning external hiring. There are moments when it is necessary, urgent, irreplaceable. It’s about no longer pretending it solves a problem that is, in truth, structural. Because as long as internal development keeps being treated as a nice exception for the sustainability report, and hunting ready-made talent keeps being every people department’s silent rule, the market will keep spinning in place. Companies paying more for people another company trained, losing them later to a third one willing to pay even more, on and on, a carousel that never creates anything, only shuffles around what already existed.

There’s something nobody says in boardroom meetings: developing people costs effort before it pays off in results. It’s an investment that never shows up in this month’s balance sheet. It’s a seed nobody watches grow while it’s underground, which is exactly why it’s always the first line cut when the budget tightens. Cutting a training budget looks like a neutral, almost technical decision. It never is. It’s always a choice between harvesting fast or planting deep, and no company ever admits, in its quarterly report, that it chose to harvest fast.

I also think about the weight we place on whoever just walked through the door. We demand instant mastery of tools the company itself never bothered to document properly. We demand autonomy from people who never had anyone explain the story behind the decisions, the reasons things are done a certain way in that specific place. Every company has its own internal grammar, its unwritten codes, its particular ways of doing things that no onboarding manual truly captures. Whoever comes from outside, however experienced, needs time to decode that grammar. And time is exactly what nobody is willing to give anymore.

There’s a sentence I hear often from exhausted leaders: I don’t have time to teach, I need this person to already know how. I understand the exhaustion, genuinely. But that sentence hides a dangerous trap. It turns short-term urgency into a permanent medium and long-term policy. The manager who never has time to teach today will still have no time tomorrow, and the day after. The pressure doesn’t disappear on its own. It just piles up, and whoever pays the price down the road is the company itself, stuck depending on an outside market that keeps getting scarcer and more expensive.

I think of a simple image: a gardener complaining that the neighbor’s plants are always prettier, without ever watering his own. He might buy already-blooming seedlings from somewhere else, plant them in his own yard, feel for a few weeks like he solved the problem. But if the soil stays dry, if the daily care routine stays absent, that store-bought seedling will wilt just like the ones before it. The problem was never the quality of the seedling. It was the absence of someone to care for it once it arrived.

There’s also an effect rarely mentioned: when a company only values whoever arrives ready-made from outside, it teaches, without meaning to, whoever is already inside that growing there isn’t worth it. Internal professionals watch, quietly, every leadership vacancy filled by someone from outside, every promotion that skips right past whoever has spent years of quiet dedication. Nothing needs to be said out loud. The message arrives on its own: here, the ones who stay don’t grow, the ones who grow come from elsewhere. And that internal talent, the very same one the company swears it doesn’t have, starts looking somewhere else for the chance it never got at home.

There’s also a huge difference between training and developing, and few companies manage to see that distinction. Training teaches a task. Developing teaches a way of thinking. You can train someone to fill out a spreadsheet in fifteen minutes. Developing that same person to understand why that spreadsheet exists, what it represents inside the larger machinery of the business, how one decision there ripples into an entire other department, that takes months, sometimes years, and requires someone willing to walk alongside, not just point at the path from a distance.

A director once told me, rather proudly, that his team was lean and efficient because he only hired people already fully formed, no training required. I kept thinking about that for days. A team like that isn’t lean. It’s fragile. Because the day the market heats up, the day a competitor offers more, that ready-made team walks out together, and the company finds itself back at zero, competing for people who no longer trust it enough to stay.

Developing people is, at its core, an act of mutual trust. The company bets that this professional, given time and guidance, will deliver more than they deliver today. And the professional bets that this investment of time and patience comes with real recognition once the growth actually happens. When that bet works on both sides, something rare emerges in today’s market: loyalty that doesn’t depend on salary alone. When it fails, all that’s left is turnover disguised as modern recruitment strategy.

And in the middle of this carousel, one question keeps lying on the floor, waiting for someone brave enough to pick it up: who, inside your company, is waiting for someone to stop, look, and say they believe in them?

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