Zero cost telecoms development: is it too good to be true?

For industries, such as telecommunications, with unprecedented growth in change and complexity, there is a need to provide continuous professional development to ensure that managers take a holistic view of the industry, and to provide them with a comprehensive understanding of the dynamic and interactive nature of the telecommunications business. But such solutions do not come free...or do they? This paper describes how, through re-engineering an existing successful product, the human resources manager´s Utopia has been achieved, i.e. high learning experience that meets the need of the industry, at zero cost. However, the road to Utopia has not been easy with the quality of the development solution declining before it re-emerged as a world-class programme. The paper argues that such development should be industry specific and should include the technical, market and commercial dimensions, and their interactive nature. It demonstrates that action-oriented learning is probably the most effective method for keeping the development ahead of the change curve