Why Professional Development Always Fails And What One Founder Is Doing About It
All working professionals have experienced a training that was absolutely out of touch with what they do in real life. Just variety slides, pitched frameworks, no next step. It's not that companies are refusing to invest in learning, they do. Professional development has been treated, much too long, as a checkbox rather than one of the strategies that differentiates competitive strategies.
Irina Lazar-Visu knows this firsthand. She has two decades of direct experience working in banking and financial services, but most of her time was spent witnessing good intentioned training programmes not moving the needle. Now Co-Founder and CEO of I-Grow, she's building what she believes the French professional training market has long been missing- a smarter more transparent way to find, compare and access learning that makes a difference.
A Career Integrating Risk, Leadership and People
Irina had a stellar career before I-Grow that many people executives would consider two or three separate careers in one.
She began her degrees in chemical engineering at Bucharest's Polytechnic University, a rigorous foundation for systems thinking and problem-solving. Later on, she graduated from banking studies and business administration, as well as executive education programs at Spiru Haret University, the Romanian Banking Institute and ESSEC Business School in France.
This was followed by 20 years in banking/manufacturing, of which 15 focused on risk management and controlling. She had held senior positions across Société Générale Group, and Orange Bank in the Orange Group, based in Romania but managing teams stretching into France, Russia and West Africa. From Credit Analyst to HR Manager, then Director of Operational Risk and Permanent Controls.
It is this wide-ranging experience — governance, compliance, cross-cultural leadership, regulatory environments, that gave her something rare: a first-hand view of how organisations really work, what traps them and what differentiates teams that thrive from those that plateau.
One observation kept coming back through all of it.
The Gap That Inspired I-Grow
The problem was not a lack of training content. If anything there was too much, unfocused, hard to digest and impossible to pencil any in before all the time and coin had already been budgeted.
Organisations were spending money on professional development but battling to rise above the noise. For which programme will there be real results? They had the correct trainer and skilled in respect to their industry context? What options could HR teams or managers compare meaningfully without weeks on research?
Irina saw a structural problem in the professional training market: the absence of a reliable, centralised place where quality learning opportunities could be discovered, compared, and accessed without friction.
This is the genesis for I-Grow, filling that gap.
What I-Grow Actually Does
It was launched in 2026 and it works along two different but complementary tracks.
The first is a training aggregation/comparison platform for the French professional education market. A comparison that allows companies or individual professionals to search, filter and compare training programmes based on relevant criteria (rather than word-of-mouth or vendor marketing), a transparent marketplace if you will. This creates visibility and structure to a historically fragmented market.
The second track is a custom training design service, based around independent subject matter experts. These are not re-packaged off-the-shelf courses with a new cover. They're programmes designed to address the actual challenges faced by a particular organisation, developed by practitioners who've worked in, not just taught about, their fields.
The two pillars tackle the same fundamental issue from different fronts, simplifying discovery for people and institutions seeking personalised learning, while making sure bespoke training delivered when necessary is crafted on real expertise.
Co-founder Iouri Goloubtzoff brings complementary experience to the venture, and the two have built I-Grow around a set of values that run against the grain of much of the training industry.
Learning That Serves Strategy, Not Just Compliance
One of the sharper ideas Irina brings to the professional development space is the argument that learning should be a strategic business function, not an HR line item.
That distinction sounds obvious until you look at how most organisations actually treat it. Training budgets get cut first in a downturn. Programmes are scheduled around convenience rather than need. Outcomes are measured by attendance, not application.
Her view is that this approach is becoming increasingly costly, especially as businesses navigate digital transformation, expanding regulatory demands, AI adoption, and fast-shifting market dynamics. The organisations that handle complexity well aren't the ones that trained the most people. They're the ones whose people know how to think, decide, and adapt.
That's the standard I-Grow is designed to support. Not content delivery for its own sake, but learning that strengthens judgment, sharpens execution, and builds the kind of capability that shows up in actual performance.
Against Bling: The Principles in the Platform
You ask Irina how I-Grow differentiates itself from other training providers, and she says that what lies at the heart of their uniqueness is something far more difficult to replicate than technology or curriculum design.
It's a promise to ensure that learning is functional and not performative. Training does not prepare people by telling them an idea in a workshop that they will forget by Monday morning, the best training prepares people with tools they can use in reality. It ought to clear a space for real reflection, and make people confront how they are thinking about work and what they currently do.
Even the way that I-Grow works. Collaboration over hierarchy. Curiosity over rigidity. Capability building over knowledge transfer Which aren't catchy marketing phrases, but rather the operational logic for how far a small number of dedicated partners can design programmes and build partnerships.
Irina believes that professional growth occurs in environments where knowledge is shared freely, critical thought is encouraged in good faith and development is viewed as a process rather than an event.
A Recognised Voice on Executive Learning
Beyond I-Grow, Irina has established herself as a sought-after conference speaker and advisor, particularly in the intersection of regulatory complexity, governance, and executive education. Her ability to take dense, technical subject matter and translate it into practical learning frameworks has made her a trusted figure for organisations navigating change.
That skill, turning complexity into clarity, sits at the heart of what I-Grow is trying to deliver at scale.
Conclusion: Professional Training is Badly Aimed
Every year, the professional training sector produces billions in revenues. However, much of that spending has little lasting impact, not because learning doesn't work, but rather because the proper learning is so hard to find and too much of what exists is not designed for actual use.
I-Grow is Irina Lazar-Visu's answer to that problem. A platform that brings transparency and ease of comparison to a crowded market. A training design capability built on genuine domain expertise. And a philosophy that treats professional development not as a cost to be managed, but as a lever organisations can actually pull when it matters.
Is that to say simply its not whether or not companies should invest in professional development as their business environment is changing quickly? This is the challenge that I-Grow is resolving.
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