Engineering manager training, and how to pick the right kind.
Most engineering managers arrive in the job the same way. Somebody left, or the team grew, and you were the obvious person. Engineering manager training is structured teaching of the people side of that job: running 1-1s, giving feedback, handling underperformance, delegating, and being understood by the people above you. It comes in five formats, and they are not interchangeable.
I became an Engineering Manager at the start of covid. The company was not hiring, the role genuinely needed filling, and I went in blind. I had no idea what it entailed or whether I would be any good at it.
That is the normal route, not the unlucky one. The Chartered Management Institute, working with YouGov, found that 82% of people entering management have had no formal management or leadership training at all. Their research is here. So when you go looking for training, you are usually doing it late, on your own time, while already doing the job.
Which means the choice matters more than the provider does. Buy the wrong format and you will conclude that management training does not work, when what actually happened is that you bought a nine-week cohort to solve a problem you had on Thursday.
The five formats
These are not ranked, and this list is not exhaustive. They solve different problems, and which one is right depends far more on your situation than on which provider is best. Most people end up with two rather than one: something steady for the ongoing work, and something sharper when a specific thing breaks. That is a reasonable place to land rather than a failure to choose.
Conferences and events
LeadDev, and the smaller regional equivalents
What it is good at. You find out you are not the only one. That is worth more than it sounds when you have spent six months assuming everyone else got a manual.
Where it leaves you. Nothing follows you home. You go back to the same team on Monday with the same person still underperforming.
Cohort programmes
Reforge and similar structured courses
What it is good at. Deadlines, and a group moving at your pace. If you need other people to make you finish things, this is the format that works.
Where it leaves you. They run to a calendar rather than to your week. The module you need most might be nine weeks out.
Mentor and coach marketplaces
Plato and the coaching networks
What it is good at. A named person who has done the job, on your actual situation, this week.
Where it leaves you. You are matched rather than choosing, so quality varies by who you draw. And it ends when you stop paying.
Frameworks and long-running shows
Manager Tools and the podcast back catalogues
What it is good at. Depth, and a system you can run rather than a set of ideas you agree with.
Where it leaves you. You have to diagnose yourself. Nobody tells you which of the six hundred episodes is the one for the thing happening now.
Memberships
EM Accelerator, and others like it
What it is good at. Structured material, and somewhere to take the thing that happened yesterday.
Where it leaves you. It only works if you turn up. One you never open is a direct debit.
Four questions that settle it
Ask these about your own situation rather than about the options. The options only make sense once you know what you are actually trying to fix.
Is it knowledge you are missing, or is there a person?
If you do not know how to run a 1-1, a course fixes that, and it fixes it cheaply. If there is a specific engineer on your team and it is going wrong right now, a course will not reach you in time. Those are different purchases. Most people buy the course, because a curriculum is easy to evaluate and a difficult conversation is not.
Do you need it this week or this quarter?
Cohorts start when they start. Self-paced material starts now. If you are three weeks in and drowning, a programme beginning in September is not training. Be honest with yourself about which one you are in, because the drowning version and the developing version want different things.
Will anything happen if you stop?
Most management learning dies quietly, because nothing forces the next step. A cohort has people who notice you missed a week. A coach has a calendar invite. A video library has nothing at all. There is no right answer here, only an honest one about how you personally work.
Who is it actually written for?
A lot of leadership training is written for directors and sold to engineering managers. If every example is about reorganisations and headcount planning, and you are trying to handle one underperformer on a team of six, the material is not wrong, it is just pitched two levels above where you are standing.
What about just reading?
It is the cheapest option and it works better than people expect, but not for the reason they hope. Books give you the map. They do not tell you where you are standing on it, and the distance between those two things is most of the difficulty of a first year in the job.
The failure mode is specific. You read something good, you agree with all of it, and then a situation turns up that looks nothing like the examples in the book. Under pressure, with nothing else to reach for, you fall back on whatever your own manager did to you. With no training, you repeat the management you were shown.
Mine took me into a meeting room on my first day for the standard welcome, and at the end of it told me, 'Remember you are a resource here.' I was in my early twenties. I said absolutely, and I did not register it as wrong, because I had no reference point for what management was supposed to look like. I found out later he had been promoted himself not long before. He was not a bad person. He was repeating what had been handed to him, which is what almost everybody does.
So read, and read deliberately rather than widely. If you want a starting point that is organised by the problem each book solves rather than by how famous it is, I keep a list of the best books for engineering managers. But if you have read four of them and changed nothing about how you run your week, more reading is not the missing piece.
Where this fits, and where it does not
EM Accelerator is the fifth format. Structured courses, expert interviews, live office hours, and a community where you can put the thing that happened yesterday in front of people who have already handled it. It is built for engineering managers rather than directors, so the examples are about one team and one difficult person.
Go elsewhere if you want a recognised credential to put in front of a promotion committee, because a named cohort programme carries more weight there than I do. Go elsewhere if you need one particular person on retainer for one particular situation, because that is what coaching marketplaces exist for. And if you already run a system you trust and only want more depth on it, a long-running framework will take you further than I will.
Come here if you are in the job now, the problems are arriving faster than you can learn them, and you want the structured material and somewhere to ask in the same place. That is a narrower gap than most training pages will admit to, and it is the one this was built for.
If what you actually need is someone in your corner rather than a library, that is 1-1 coaching, and it is a different thing with a different price.
Final thoughts
None of this makes you a good manager. Training gives you language for what you are seeing and a system to fall back on when you are tired, and that is worth a great deal, but I have worked with untrained managers who were better natural leaders than I will ever be. The formats above change how quickly you learn. They do not change whether you were going to care.
The thing I would go back and tell myself in 2020 is that I waited far too long to look for any of it, because I assumed the not-knowing was a me problem rather than a structural one. It was not. It is the normal condition of the job, and it is fixable much earlier than most people try.