Developing Talents For The Future Of Your Company
“Learning is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. Improvement is not compulsory; it’s voluntary. But to survive, we must learn.”
– Edwards Deming
The notion of human capital development emerged is in the United States back in the 1970s, focusing on individual learning and education. By the early 1990s, the concept was broadened with additional attention to organizational performance and capability. Today, the term “talent development” is widely used by businesses and industries, including the member companies in the MSCI community, as a strategy to create high-performing, sustainable organizations.
With an extended mission, talent development is more than just training; it reflects a paradigm shift that values a more holistic approach to developing talent by means beyond commonly adopted training methods, such as job shadowing, job coaching, career mentoring, online blogging, job aids, book clubs, and many more.
Current Trends
The world is changing faster than we have anticipated. In a 2024 Global Talent Trends report by Mercer, based on a survey with more than 12,200 C-suite executives, human resources (HR) leaders, employees, and investors globally, some interesting findings were revealed — many of which have direct implications for the workplace and talent development.
For example:
- Of the 16 geopolitical and socioeconomic forces impacting organizations’ three-year plans, digital acceleration, including AI, was the second most frequently mentioned force.
- Of the 20 different initiatives identified as HR priorities for the 2024 People agenda, three among the top 10 are directly related to talent development, including designing talent processes around skills, improving people managers’ capabilities, and investing in talent assessment and employee skills development.
- Of the 10 areas for investment, investing in employee upskilling/reskilling was identified by C-suite as the top one with the most power to move the needle.
- Of the 12 drains on employee productivity, too much “busy work” (tasks that don’t add value) was identified as the #1 productivity killer, followed by too many interruptions/lacking “thinking” time.
- 48 percent of HR leaders see skills shortage as a top threat to their business in 2024.
New Demands
The trends highlighted above are just a few of many emerging issues that business leaders and HR professionals must face today. Taken all together, it makes the need for putting people at the center of organization management more important than ever. Talent development is about bringing out individual and organizational potential through learning and development interventions. To effectively develop talents in response to the new demands in the workplace, business and HR leaders and managers must first develop a solid understanding of the Core Competencies needed for both short-term and long-term success.
The Association for Talent Development (ATD), the world’s largest association for developing talent in an organization, proposed a Talent Development Capability Model in 2023, as a guide for the development of individuals and organizations. In this model, 23 key capabilities are highlighted as impactful at three levels: personal, organizational, and professional. This framework was informed by the latest trends affecting talent development, such as digital transformation, and capturing emerging capabilities demanded by the changing environment, such as data analytics, emotional intelligence, and decision making.
For the MSCI member companies, the ATD model is not just a useful tool for individual talent assessment, it can also help project the needs for a future workplace enabled and empowered by artificial intelligence.
New Strategies
Identifying core capabilities is just one of many steps that need to be taken; effective talent development also requires adopting a big-picture view and an holistic approach. In our book, Optimizing Human Capital Development: A Distributor’s Guide to Building a Sustainable Competitive Advantage Through Talent Strategy, my colleagues, Barry Lawrence, and Bharani Nagarathnam, and I outlined five key domains of practice associated with talent development: training and development; career development; succession planning high-potential development; and leadership development.
These practices are grounded in our belief that each member of the organization, regardless of his or her job title or position, has talent within. When that talent is properly identified and developed, the individual has the capability to make positive contributions to the organization’s mission. Each of these areas of practice will be explored in the upcoming four-part MSCI Talent Development Webinar series, which will be scheduled soon. (Stay tuned to MSCI’s webinar calendar for information.)
To conclude, here are a few questions as food for thought. Hopefully, answers to these questions will help your organization assess how it has been doing in developing talents from within. Ask:
- Who do you consider as talents within your company?
- What is your company’s overall talent development strategy?
- What are key components in your talent development process?
- How do you cultivate potential employees for critical positions?
- How do you capture the impact of your talent development programs?
- To what degree do your talent development programs contribute to your business goals and objectives?
Jia Wang is a professor in the Department of Educational Administration and Human Resource Development at Texas A&M University. Her research focuses on international and national human resource development, organization crisis management, and learning within organizations.