27 Apr 82% of managers have had no formal training. Here is what that costs.
In 2024, the Chartered Management Institute published research conducted in partnership with YouGov that found 82% of managers who enter management positions have had no formal management and leadership training. The CMI named the phenomenon ‘accidental managers’, and the label has since become widely used in L&D and HR conversations.
The statistic is striking enough to stop a conversation, but it is not the most important number in the data. What matters more is what happens as a result of it. This post works through the evidence on what undertrained managers cost the people they manage, and the organisations they work for – and what closing that gap looks like in practice.
How the accidental manager happens
The pattern is well established and consistent across sectors. Someone is very good at their job. They are reliable, knowledgeable, and valued by their colleagues. The organisation promotes them into a management role because those qualities are real and worth rewarding.
At that point, the assumptions diverge. The organisation assumes that capability in the technical role will translate into capability as a manager. The newly promoted manager assumes that they will figure out the people side as they go. Neither assumption is well-founded, and neither is anyone’s fault in isolation. It is a structural failure that organisations repeat at scale.
The CMI’s research confirms the scale of the repetition: not just 82% of managers overall, but 26% of senior managers and leaders also report having had no formal management or leadership training, and 52% of all managers say they have had none at all. The problem does not resolve itself as people are promoted further – in many cases, it compounds.
What it costs the people being managed
The consequences land first on the people the accidental manager is responsible for, and the data here is both consistent and significant.
Research from Unmind, surveying 3,000 managers and 3,000 employees, found that 28% of employees had left a business because of a negative relationship with their manager, and a further 33% said they were less motivated to do their work because of ineffective management.
These figures represent a direct cost to organisations in recruitment, onboarding, and lost institutional knowledge. But they also represent a quieter, harder-to-measure cost: the productivity and engagement of the people who stay but are less committed than they might be under more effective leadership.
Perhaps most pointedly, 58% of employees said their manager would benefit from education or training to improve their management skills. That is the view of the people closest to the management quality problem – the direct reports.
What it costs the organisation
The cost at the team level accumulates into measurable organisational impact, and the data here is specific enough to be useful in a budget conversation.
Almost half of managers themselves (47%) said that the lack of formal management training at their workplace contributed to lost productivity. This is not an external assessment; it is managers identifying their own training gap as a drag on their team’s output.
The failure rate data is also relevant. Research from ATA Recruitment suggests that around 60% of new managers in the UK fail within their first year, due to inadequate training, high pressure, and lack of support. Even if that figure overstates the picture in some sectors, the direction is consistent with everything else in the data: organisations are promoting people into management roles and then not giving them what they need to succeed.
The cost of a failed management appointment is difficult to calculate precisely, but it includes the recruitment cost of the replacement, the productivity loss during the transition, the impact on the team that reported to that manager, and, if the failure caused attrition in the team, the further recruitment and onboarding costs downstream.
Formal management training is not an expense that sits on one side of a ledger. The absence of it has its own cost, distributed across turnover, productivity, and the accumulated drag of undertrained managers making decisions they are not equipped to make well.
Why promotion tends to outpace development
The accidental manager problem persists not because organisations are indifferent to it, but because the structure of most organisations makes it difficult to solve.
Promotions happen quickly, in response to business need and individual performance, on timelines that do not easily accommodate a two-year development programme. The result is that the development investment, when it happens at all, comes after the person is already in the role – sometimes years after – rather than as a deliberate preparation for it.
The CMI’s policy director, Anthony Painter described the pattern directly in response to the Better Managers research: organisations continue to prioritise technical competence over leadership skills when making promotion decisions, and the data makes clear that this pattern has consequences.
The structural solution is not to slow down promotions. It is to treat formal management development as a parallel investment rather than a retrospective correction – to have a programme in place that managers can enter at any point in their career, at the level appropriate to where they are, on a schedule that works alongside a full-time role.
What CMI qualifications address that informal development does not
There is a case sometimes made that good managers can develop through experience, mentoring, and on-the-job feedback, without formal qualification. That case is not wrong as experience and mentoring matter. But it misses the specific things that a formal qualification provides.
First, it provides a structured framework. Experienced managers often have well-developed instincts in the areas where they have been tested, and significant blind spots in the areas where they have not. A CMI qualification is designed to cover the full breadth of management capability at a given level, which means it surfaces the gaps that informal development tends to miss.
Second, it provides external verification. A manager who has completed a CMI Diploma has been assessed against a nationally regulated standard by an accredited centre. That verifiability matters in the labour market, where employers are paying a measurable premium for managers who hold it, and it matters inside an organisation, where the qualification creates a common language for management capability.
Third, it creates a pathway. A CMI Level 5 Diploma opens the Fast Track route to Chartered Manager status. A Level 7 Diploma does the same at a more senior career stage. Chartered Manager is the highest professional accreditation in management and leadership in the UK, and the qualification is the most direct route to it.
None of this means that informal development has no value. It means that formal qualification does something that informal development cannot replicate…and that the 82% of managers currently without it are operating without a significant professional asset.
Closing the gap
If the accidental manager problem is a structural one, the response has to be structural rather than ad hoc. That means having a programme in place that is always available – not commissioned reactively after a promotion has already happened – and that covers the full career span of management development from Level 3 through to Level 7.
Aicura delivers CMI qualifications at Level 3 to Level 7 as a CMI Strategic Delivery Partner, on a rolling open-programme basis that managers can join at any point in the year. For organisations with sufficient numbers, closed-cohort delivery allows the programme to be contextualised to the organisation’s specific management challenges and strategic priorities.
Increasingly, organisations come to us not with a qualification level in mind, but with a specific challenge: a leadership pipeline that is not developing fast enough, a culture shift that requires a new kind of management capability, or a workforce change that demands something the standard programme catalogue does not cover. In those situations, we design a bespoke programme around the need rather than simply the qualifications being sought. The CMI qualification framework provides the assessed, externally verified structure; the programme design, content, and delivery are shaped to meet the organisation’s specific context.
Talent management is one of the key features in the programmes that we design for organisations that need their current leaders to identify, develop, and retain the people who will carry the business forward.
If you’re ready to explore what a professional CMI programme could look like for your organisation, the starting point is a conversation.
Details of Aicura’s full CMI programme, ranging from Level 3 to Level 7
Get in touch via aicura.com/cmi.