The Faculty Development-Deployment Gap

• Faculty development creates institutional value only when business schools also provide opportunities for faculty to apply their newly acquired capabilities.
• Schools that give faculty greater agency in career development conversations are more likely to uncover underused expertise, hidden leadership potential, and capabilities that traditional job descriptions overlook.
• The effectiveness of faculty development should be measured not just in how many programs are offered or how many faculty take part, but also in whether faculty translate their new skills into meaningful contributions to the institution.

 
Before entering academia, I spent years coordinating more than 1,600 management development, organizational development, and human resource management programs for corporate clients. After I moved into university life, one contrast became increasingly difficult to ignore: Business schools teach organizations to identify, develop, and deploy talent strategically, yet they often organize faculty development around a calendar of workshops. Faculty then return to workloads and structures that leave them little room to apply what they have learned.

The problem is not that workshops are ineffective. It is that development is only one part of talent management.

I think of the missing connection as the faculty development-deployment gap, which is the distance between a capability that has been merely developed and a capability that an institution actually enables someone to use.

That gap matters, especially now. AACSB’s 2026 Global Standards for Business Education place explicit emphasis on the strategic deployment of faculty and on well-documented processes to manage, develop, and support faculty over the progression of their careers. The language here is important. Development and deployment sit inside the same system.

Adopting a talent management mindset can help business schools build that system without relying on the language of “high potentials,” which can sit uneasily in a university setting. Such a label can imply that investment should be concentrated on a select group of faculty identified as future leaders, potentially overlooking the valuable contributions that other individuals make through their teaching, research, engagement, and service. Instead, schools can treat faculty capability as a strategic resource while recognizing that people contribute in different ways and develop along different paths.

Here are five shifts that schools can make to help close the development-deployment gap.

1. Start With Capabilities, Not Workshops

Business schools often begin their faculty development activities by deciding which sessions to run, what training is available, or which external speakers to invite.

By contrast, true talent management begins with a different question: What capabilities will our school need next?

Business schools are adapting to advances in artificial intelligence, changing employer expectations, increasing pressure for research impact, and growing demands for engagement with practice. These changes do not require every faculty member to become the same kind of academic. They require schools to foster a portfolio of capabilities.

The diversity of academic work already makes this clear. According to 2024–25 U.K. higher education staff statistics from the Higher Education Statistics Agency, 43 percent of academic staff members in the U.K. were employed on teaching-and-research contracts, 35 percent on teaching-only contracts, and 21 percent on research-only contracts. Almost three in 10 academic staff were on fixed-term contracts. A single development menu is unlikely to serve such different roles, career stages, and aspirations equally well.

Faculty development becomes more strategic when it is tied to capabilities the school intends to use.

Schools should therefore identify a small number of future capability priorities. Once they have chosen those priorities, they can then map where those capabilities already exist, where they are emerging, and where gaps remain.

For example, consider a school that wants to develop stronger ties to industry. It might have multiple faculty who could help make those connections, but they need additional training. One colleague might need support translating research for practitioner audiences, another might be well placed to build relationships with external organizations, and another might have the experience to lead a wider knowledge-exchange initiative. A single development offer is unlikely to meet all three needs.

The same applies to faculty who can help a school reach its goals in areas such as executive education, industry engagement, program leadership, public scholarship, and research impact. Development becomes more strategic when it is tied to capabilities the school intends to use.

2. Treat Development and Deployment as One Decision

Organizations waste talent when they develop people without creating opportunities for them to make different types of contributions. Universities can make the same mistake.

For example, faculty members might complete leadership development activities but receive no meaningful leadership opportunities. They might become highly capable in employer engagement but have no route into executive education or external partnerships, or they might develop innovative teaching practices while workload pressures make experimentation harder rather than easier.

In each case, the development has occurred. The deployment has not.

This is why every question about where schools should make substantial development investment should be paired with a second question: Where will this capability be used?

The answer does not need to be a promotion. Once faculty have developed new capabilities, schools can provide those faculty with bounded opportunities such as leading a curriculum redesign, mentoring colleagues, coordinating an employer partnership, or joining a research initiative.

Talent management practice has long recognized deployment as more than placing people into jobs. The talent management guidance provided by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development highlights project work, skill enhancement opportunities, job rotations, and secondments as ways organizations can deploy talent. Business schools can apply the same logic internally.

The shift is subtle but important. Instead of saying, “We developed this person,” academic administrators can ask, “What capability did we develop, and where are we enabling it to create value?”

3. Give Faculty More Agency Over How They Develop

A strategic system still fails if development is designed entirely from the top down.

Faculty are not passive recipients of development. They often know which parts of their roles are underused, where their expertise could travel, where they want to improve, and which barriers are preventing progress. That information is valuable to the institution.

Development conversations should therefore move beyond directing people toward available courses. They also should surface questions such as: What contribution do you want to make that you are not making now? Which capability would you like to deepen? What is stopping that from happening?

Instead of saying, “We developed this person,” academic administrators can ask, “What capability did we develop, and where are we enabling it to create value?”

These conversations make talent visible. They can also reveal a problem that formal workload systems often miss: Valuable capabilities might exist within an institution without being recognized as available organizational capacity.

For instance, someone known primarily as a strong lecturer might also have valuable industry relationships that nobody has thought to use. A colleague with no formal leadership title might already be the person everyone quietly relies on for mentoring. Unless institutions create mechanisms for faculty to voice concerns and direct career conversations, these capabilities can remain hidden inside job descriptions and disciplinary silos.

This is why faculty agency deserves a central place in talent management. It is part of the information system through which schools can identify talent in the first place.

4. Treat Recognition and Mobility as Development Tools

Business schools sometimes equate development with formal learning, but some of the most powerful development experiences are opportunities to move.

In academia, mobility does not have to mean leaving an institution or changing job titles. It can mean movement across projects, responsibilities, communities, and forms of contribution.

A teaching-focused academic might move into educational leadership, while a researcher might build public-engagement experience instead. Rather than starting with a new title or seeking a formal role, someone drawn to leadership might first take on a time-limited initiative.

These moves allow people to test new professional identities and build capability through practice.

Recognition matters alongside mobility. If administrators repeatedly treat additional contributions as invisible labor, faculty will eventually stop viewing those contributions as developmental. Schools need credible ways to acknowledge people who mentor, innovate, build partnerships, create public impact, or take on work that strengthens the institution but sits outside conventional output measures.

AACSB Insights has already documented one useful example. Aalborg University Business School in Denmark broadened its approach to faculty impact across academic, educational, business, and public dimensions. The school linked these contributions to career-development conversations, using those conversations to identify strengths among faculty and discuss opportunities aligned with their individual career aspirations.

Other schools do not need to use Aalborg’s exact categories; what matters is that they foster the underlying connections between contribution, recognition, and future opportunities that make development feel believable.

5. Measure Whether New Capabilities Get Used

Faculty development activities are easy to count. Capability is harder to measure.

Schools can report the number of workshops, hours of training, and mentoring sessions they offer, as well as the number of participants who take and complete programs. But while these metrics show activity, they do not tell us whether the institution became more capable.

A talent management approach asks different questions.

Specifically, it asks what faculty can now do that they could not do before, and where their new capabilities have actually been deployed. Development may show up as curriculum innovation, stronger research collaboration, or new leadership capacity, but the more telling question is whether a newly developed strength has been used beyond the individual who developed it.

A talent management approach asks what faculty can now do that they could not do before, and where their new capabilities have actually been deployed.

Not every outcome needs a complex metric. Six months after a development activity has been completed, a follow-up conversation or a short review of changed practices, project outcomes, peer feedback, and new contributions may be more informative than another satisfaction survey administered immediately after a workshop.

None of this is meant to add another performance management exercise to faculty life; it is meant to find out whether a school’s investment has actually crossed the development-deployment gap.

Five Questions That Connect Development and Deployment

Before approving the next development initiative, business school leaders should ask five questions:

1. Which future capability are we trying to build?
2. Who already has, or could develop, that capability?
3. What development would genuinely strengthen it?
4. Where will people have an opportunity to use it?
5. How will that contribution be recognized, shared, and reviewed?

If a school can answer the first three questions but not the last two, it may be investing in learning without building organizational capability. Business schools do not need fewer development opportunities. They need stronger connections between development, opportunity, and contribution.

For me, that is the central lesson a talent management perspective brings to faculty development. Capability does not create value simply because it exists. It creates value when organizational conditions allow people to deploy it in purposeful ways.

Closing the faculty development-deployment gap requires business schools to do more than create a better training calendar. It requires them to think about their faculty’s collective skills and potential as a living portfolio of capabilities that must be developed, mobilized, recognized, and renewed.

My earlier experience coordinating more than 1,600 development programs taught me a simple lesson: Developing capability is only part of talent management. What matters just as much is creating the conditions for people to use it. For business schools, adopting a comprehensive talent management mindset can make a strategic difference.