Many businesses put a high emphasis on attracting and recruiting talented individuals, but developing, managing and retaining them is of equal importance.
Strategically managing the talent of your employees is invaluable to any business; contributing not only to staff retention, but also engagement and high workplace performance - adding subsequent value and return on investment.
Identifying talent within your business
In order to identify talented individuals within your business, ask yourself these questions:
- Do they directly make a positive difference to the organisation?
- Do they demonstrate the potential of moving on to higher levels of employment?
It’s good practice to identify employees of high potential in order to begin work on their training, retention and development. A method more traditionally favoured by employers features a structured selection process in order to encourage employees to perform. This method can, however, be detrimental to employees not selected, particularly if sufficiently sensitive and practical feedback is not given - particularly among the Millennial generation.
Talent management
Talent management itself is the systematic attraction, identification, development, engagement, retention and deployment of individuals who are of particular value to an organisation, either in view of their high potential for the future or because they are fulfilling roles critical to the operation of the business.
Tailored Training
In the same way, you would desire a different skill set for different job roles, it is paramount that all training is specifically tailored towards your talent management strategy, ensuring you are nurturing the employees of the most value to your business.
However, it is not just important to train those identified as having ‘high potential’. A lack of general training within the workplace is linked to low staff retention, so the key here is to identify the appropriate training in relation to each individual's career path.
Tailoring training by demographic
Talent training programmes may include a range of activities, in a range of styles from formal training methods to more informal microlearning or mobile training methods. This relates directly to the job role and demographics of the individual in question.
As identified in a variety of our other blogs, the working practices, and preferred training methods of different demographic groups is vast. Understanding how best to train each demographic group is paramount to conducting successful development and delivering a return on investment from each of your employees.
The main difference between training Baby Boomers and training Millennials comes down to the fact Baby Boomers are happy to train as part of a team. They are the generation who work together to get things done, and as such, prefer group training methods.
Millennials, however, known as the ‘me’ generation prefer to train individually as opposed to in groups in order to have their personal value recognised. As a generation, Millennials prefer training in the form of micro-learning as opposed to traditional formal training methods.
This method also lends itself to be utilised for mobile learning. It’s easy to forget that Baby Boomers are also tech-savvy; thanks to the rise of the ‘silver surfer’ - 83% of Baby Boomers are now regular internet users, for this reason, a heavy technology focus within training is welcomed.