In recent conversations with those at the coal face of learning and development, Donald H Taylor has been struck with how much pressure L&D is under. Taking inspiration from TV chef Jamie Oliver's struggle to improve the nation's diet, he asks, who are you in the training kitchen: waiter, chef or minister?

"It's just not like me," one training manager reported to me the other day. "I'm normally in control, but right now stuff just keeps landing on my plate. People are being unreasonable."

I sympathise. We are suffering from a national skills crisis, and L&D professionals are bearing the brunt. But the crisis is not that executives don't value skills, or that there aren't enough L&D people or systems to support them. It isn't even that managers won't ask for training.

The crisis is that the British nation doesn't understand skills.

"Effective L&D can only be achieved by working with managers, but most managers know as much about L&D as they do about preparing a béarnaise sauce."

Of course that's a generalisation. But in the same way that we don't generally understand the art of cooking as a nation, it seems that we have a collective failure in understanding skills. Jamie Oliver will always find pockets of fine cuisine among us, but they are islands amid a sea of pot noodles and microwavable TV dinners. And yet what he has to show us goes beyond the kitchen – but more on that later.

The food/skills analogy is closer than it first might appear. Anyone involved in the administration or management of training will know what it feels like to be a waiter, moving from table to table, subject to a constant wave of demands, juggling resources to keep a stream of courses coming.

Others, meanwhile, work in the skills equivalent of fast-food joints, serving up their helpings rapid-fire from a standard menu. Judged by the number of people leaving the building with full stomachs, they might be considered successful, but just as a constant diet of junk food is no good long-term, so only providing the courses that people think they want will seldom lead to effective development.

A healthy diet is a balanced one, and most people need some assistance in developing their skills in the directions best for them.

Effective L&D can only be achieved by working with managers, but most managers know as much about L&D as they do about preparing a béarnaise sauce. But just as a béarnaise isn't complicated, neither are the basics of L&D allocation. Members of a manager's team either need training or not, and the manager can choose to ask for training, or not.

This means that you can put any manager into one of four cells in this two-by-two box:

Alternatively we can use these easy-to-remember terms:

The Time Bandits are the ones who demand training for problems that would be better solved by good management. The managers in the School of Hard Knocks believe that trying and failing at a job is better than being trained for it and succeeding.

The grown ups are the ones we all hope to deal with.

What we'd like to do, of course, is to get all managers where they should be:

The issue of changing people's behaviour is not the physical ability to learn the skill, but the attitude needed. When you have always done things one way, it's just easier to keep doing it that way, even when it's not much use.

The good news is that managers don't suffer from a bad attitude, and they are not generally lazy. The Time Bandits and the toughies in the School of Hard Knocks both just need a little help to understand what L&D can and can't do for them.

The Time Bandits are easy to reach – because they come to the L&D department asking for training. They need to be sat down and engaged in a conversation. A performance consulting conversation, not a training conversation. (See a previous TrainingZone.co.uk piece: Training is not enough) Hopefully they will be inspired to see that there are other solutions to their performance issues than training.

Those in the School of Hard Knocks are harder, as you might expect. They don't come to L&D because they don't see the point of it.

Strangely enough, these tough guys will probably respond well to someone approaching them the right way. The right way is not to hand over a schedule of courses, but to see whether their problems involve any issues of knowledge and skills gaps that L&D can help with. It is, in fact, also a performance consulting conversation.

These conversations are not always easy. They can be both delicate and tough and are potentially fraught with political issues. Any L&D professional aiming to set the agenda on training can expect to hit trouble. In his latest book on performance consulting 'How to be a True Business Partner', Nigel Harrison devotes all of chapter two, about 20% of the entire book, to 'Resilience'. Resilience means dealing with the rubbish that comes your way when you refuse to let L&D be just a fulfilment house.

Changing people's habits takes time. Jamie Oliver is finding that, but he is doing what he believes in, and is sticking to it. He is, in other words, showing great resilience.

Yes, things are difficult right now in L&D and managers are likely to be harder than ever to deal with. It's not the perfect time to start trying to change behaviour, but if the alternative is being run ragged, then maybe it's time to start those difficult conversations, stop being seen as waiters and start being seen as the ministers of skills.

Donald H Taylor is chairman of the Learning Technologies conference, which runs from 28-29 January 2009. He blogs at www.donaldhtaylor.co.uk.