What is Talent Management?
Talent management is a term that emerged in the 1990s to incorporate an increasing focus in Human Retargets Management on planned and strategic management of employees, often with a focus on senior leaders.
(Source: Wikipedia)
What is Critical Skills Gap Analysis?
A skill gap analysis is a process businesses use to determine whether employees can complete their assigned tasks accurately and without difficulty. During a skill gap analysis, businesses identify the various skills that an employee needs to fulfill his duties. The business then analyzes the skills the employee possesses to determine if there is a difference between his current skills and the skills he needs to perform his job well.
Source: smallbusiness.com
Why they must tie in together?
While talking about talent management often the review cycles get entangled and engrossed in preparing strategies for talent retention and succession planning. A major point that often gets missed is to have a present and future plan for critical skills gap analysis for employee and management. The emphasis here must to focus on skills that might be more prevalent in future.
Employees and most often the talented workforce prefer a growing and challenging work environment. Computer based training programs and general off the mill courses are not what might excite them anymore. Innovation and involving your talented workforce in coming up with ideas on the new training ideas is the key to meaningful engagement and talent retention.
Using efficient talent management tools might be helpful in preparing an engaging and meaningful talent management process for your organization.
A study by SHRM and wsj.com/careers says:
While there has been much concern about remedying skills deficiencies among new entrants to the workforce, continuous learning and skills training are crucial to sustaining workforce readiness among employees of all experience levels. In addition to addressing skills gaps, training and professional development programs can help workers prepare for emerging skills needs in the workplace as well as to transition skills sets for workers who are embarking on new career paths or stepping up to increased responsibilities. This is especially critical for organizations’ succession planning efforts and “growing talent from within,” a strategy that may be even more important for smaller organizations with fewer retargets to attract top candidates.
How it can be done
- Prepare career development and skills assessments plans for mid and senior level employees, with emphasis on training for future friendly skills. Often it is the entry level and employees with few years of experience who are presented this opportunity and most often avail these.
It is important to emphasize that development does not mean the same as training. Training is a short-term effort intended to equip individuals with the knowledge, skills and attitudes they need to do their present jobs. But development is a long-term effort intended to build competencies for the future, and most development occurs on the job.
Both training and development are often necessary to help individuals build the competencies they need to function at higher levels of responsibility.
- Assess and get feedback from the senior employees on their preferred mode of training. Some courses or online training might not work for the senior management.
Traditional talent management programs emphasize efforts to groom people by building the competencies they need to be considered promotable. But cutting-edge programs may also give attention to leveraging the talents of high professionals and maintaining the skills of high performers.
This ADP-produced infographic illustrates the three key phases of 21st century Talent Management.
What are your best practices on talent management that really work?
