Though we live in a digital and AI-driven economy, the product of the work we do needs a human element. People are a hard-and-fast need for every company of course, and talent development is required to retain them. Talent development is game-changing, as you can develop your employee’s skills to suit your company and increase sustainability for your company. Training programs based on evaluation of skill gaps and managing and planning succession are steps that can be taken towards talent development. These steps are crucial for improving organizational performance and building capacity of employees. This blog will act as a helpful guide on how to grow talent and talent development strategies.
Talent Development Strategies: What is Talent Development
Efforts to increase your employee’s existing skill set while adding new skills to their arsenal are called talent development strategies. This helps a company meet it’s goals and stay an active player in a competitive, global market.
In order to master talent development efficiently, your management team needs to ensure that the strategies align with corporate aims and business needs. Training given to employees needs to focus on the company’s long term goals.
Employees are working for your company because they want to grow and attain long-term career success. The best way to ensure that employees don’t quit easily is investing in their career, the same way employees invest their time into your organization. Employees are usually keen to connect personal goals with the goals of the business or the employer
Baseline training or teaching employees about the basis of company rules and regulations is not enough to retain and develop employees long-term.
The employees building the workforce of a company need support, structure, and encouragement. Investment needs to be made into helping your employees attain and maintain knowledge and a good skill set. Talent development programs can help with this and they can also help you secure a long-term place in the future. Talent development strategies need to go hand-in-hand with company objectives.
Talent Development Strategies: Why You Need Them
There are two problems that arise when companies don’t invest in talent development strategies, poor employee retention, and poor skillset of existing employees. Luckily, figuring out what is talent development and how to go about it, can greatly change things for your organization.
In a post-covid world, companies need to step up their game when it comes to recruitment and obtaining employees displaced from the workforce. Displaced employees can also be very talented and a good fit for your company, perfect for filling future roles.
Filling your organization with displaced employees, however, is not the right way to go. Organizations have a growing demand for employees and not every employee can be a right fit for you. Hiring just about anybody is not a responsible action, and your organization needs to prepare for future business objectives. Talent development, on the other hand, can make or break a company’s future.
In a world where technology is taking a front seat, manpower may seem obsolete but it’s needed now more than every to harness technological advancements. New jobs requiring new skill sets are being created by the second. Boston Consulting Group claims that by 2030, tens of thousands of new opportunities will be created.
Fields like STEM, social services, education, healthcare, and computer-focused employment will have a greater demand for employees now more than ever.
Perhaps the most important human resource management task is talent development. Here are some ways in which talent development strategies can help your organization apart from the above-mentioned points.
1. Preparing the Organization for the Future
Not preparing your organization for an uncertain future can be a grave problem, and this is where a talent development strategy comes into play. If a company empowers employees to figure out their skills and increase their competence, your employees will give your company a competitive edge. Empowering your employees to increase their potentials can help you reach business goals faster, and prevent you from constant recruitment to replace unhappy, obsolete, or dissatisfied employees.
2. Improved Employee Engagement
Employees need to be engaged in their work to feel happy and productive in the workplace. As an employer or a member of human resources, you can boost engagement by helping the creation of a career path for each employee. Ensure that when you design the career path, you account for the employee’s skills and interest, in order to create a learning program for success.
3. Creating New Ideas and Generating Business Opportunities
A talent development program can help your company take on bigger and better clients, leading to more profit. Employees can learn new things and use their knowledge to create more efficient business plans. Employee development can also lead to discovering income opportunities from previously undiscovered clients and opportunities.
4. Developing an Effective Management Team
Managers are just as important as new employees and need to build solid career paths too. Managers surely play an important role in defining and driving employee experience. But managers need to be trained on how to impact employees without requiring extra resources.
5. Improving Employee Retention
Loyalty is a two-way street even in the business world, and employees are proven to be loyal to employers who make an investment in their career. LinkedIn conducted a study where 94% of respondents claim that they would be more likely to stay at a company where employers invest in their careers. This is helps keep your employees connected even during remote or flexible work. Keeping talent development at the forefront of your human resources strategies can help you retain talent.
Talent Development Strategies: How to Go About Them
An improved talent development program involves not only the human resources team, but also the learning team. You need to provide your employees with new learning opportunities in order to increase their skillsets. It is likely that your talent development strategies need a little bit of tweaking and here’s how you can start:
1. Figure Out Your Company’s Business Objectives
Organizational objectives are key to improve upon already-existing talent development strategies. Business goals are ever-changing, meaning that your talent development programs need to align with them and stay dynamic too in order to prepare for the future. Build upon existing strategies and keep changing and improving upon them to add excitement and motivation to the workplace. For example, if your firm works with machine-learning, then your employees need to increase their skills in that area.
2. Give Employees More Upskilling and Reskilling Opportunities
Employees have two kinds of skills, the ones that are being utilized, and the ones that need to be applied. New and natural learning opportunities in talent development programs need to understand how to develop underutilized expertise and knowledge. This may include training your employees for new jobs, which gives them more adaptability, and newer skills which help build their capacities for business goals in the long run.
A lot of your organization’s workforce will have basic skills that you can build upon. Upskilling initiatives are likely to help all of your employees. In an ever-evolving world, some jobs may become obsolete, but instead of sacking these loyal employees, you can reskill them to help them adapt to taking on new roles and positions.
3. Provide Natural Learning Opportunities and New Learning Methods
Learning and development is a complicated route, but you can use an approach tailored to your organization’s employees to meet all of their needs. You can go about talent development strategies through on-the-job learning, e-learning, self-learning, coaching, mentorship programs, and so on. Your management team is an iportant part of your workforce and need to included in the process. A tip from us is to make directories of learning resources readily available to employees.
4. Creating a Work Culture Based on Learning
Active learning needs to be the forefront of your talent development strategies. Employees need encouragement to focus on learning and developing adaptability. Research and surveys have found that companies with continuous learning as a core value thrive more than others, as their workforce is more productive.
5. Promote Performance Coaching
A crucial aspect of talent development is performance coaching, which acts as a part of on-the-job learning and ensures that employees improve skills through daily tasks and interactions. A helpful example would be managers using a Skill Will Matrix to determine which coaching strategies would be best for individual employees. A measurable parameter of learning is performance.
6. Improve Leadership Development
A key aspect of employee retention is figuring out the employees who are loyal to your company and preparing a career path for them. This may include leadership development plans that solidify the leadership talent pipeline. Talent development strategies also work on improving the bond between managers and their subordinates, leading to a healthy workplace environment.
7. Including Stakeholders in the Process
Communication is key, and developing employees and training programs involves a lot of it. The human resources team, team managers, talent managers, and employees must come together with stakeholders to brainstorm how to develop talent. Your organization must create committees to cheerlead talent development programs, discuss gaps in skills, and monitor progress.
8. Evaluate and Improve
Success of talent development programs require data tracking and measuring against performance goals to see where you and your team stand, where you’re lacking, and improvement strategies. Learning management systems along with regular feedback from employees can improve the quality of learning opportunities and constantly improve upon business goals and activities.
We hope this blog helped you understand how to go about talent development and we look forward to hearing your talent development strategies.
The Bottom Line: What is Talent Development and How Does it Help
Here are some of the many benefits of talent development strategies:
- Improved engagement levels
- Greater profitability
- Improved employee retention, causing a reduction in the stress and burden of recruitment
- Developing employees helps them help yur organization meet business goals.
Talent development is nowhere near a one-time process, it needs careful planning, design, and enactment. The biggest benefit of talent development is that your employees help you attain organizational growth and sustainability in exchange for investment in their careers.
