Talent management strategies
What is a talent management model? As companies push forward into the future, data and statistics are being used to define every aspect of working life.
Exact numbers are the benchmark by which companies grade their success. Having data available to know exactly how skilled your employees are, is the next logical step to help you track progress and achieve business excellence. However, recent figures have shown there is a global digital skills gap, and the majority of companies are not investing enough time into improving the digital skills of their employees.
Possessing such exact information on their skill sets requires a talent management tool that can objectively keep track of your employee’s skills and performance. That’s where talent management strategies come in.
What is the digital skills gap?
“Workforces do not always have the skills needed to manage digital transformation, and businesses often struggle to find talent for digital roles.” Rand.org
The digital skills gap is an effective deficiency in the digital skills of employees across the globe.
A general trend that suggests a huge amount of businesses are ill-equipped to cope with the rapid advancement of technology. According to the digital skills gap index (DSGI) 2021,
“only 4.2% of the survey respondents were completely satisfied with the level and availability of digital skills.”
Not only that but technical talent acquisition is difficult and hiring new employees who possess the right skills is challenging. Put simply, there are more tech roles available than there are qualified candidates to fill them.
Read –What are digital skills?
What is talent management?
As technology continues to advance at a faster pace than ever, so, more employees and potential employees, find their skills are no longer up to date.
As Salesforce put it,
“Nearly three out of four respondents worldwide say they aren’t equipped with the resources needed to learn the digital skills they need to succeed in the current and future workforce.”
Talent management is an attempt to solve this problem. It involves companies preparing their workforce for the challenge ahead—equipping employees with the skills and confidence needed to adapt to the changing world. It’s about providing companies with the tools needed to achieve their business goals and keep their employees at the cutting edge of digital skills development.
What is a talent management system?
The key goal of a talent management system is to align all talent-related decisions with the company’s business objectives.
By having the right employees onboard, who possess the necessary skills to propel your business forward, you can create a structure that will serve both your company and your customers well in the future.
A talent management process involves more than just training your employees. It involves tracking and measuring the performance of your employees in various skills. This doesn’t only apply to new employees. The skills of existing employees should be mapped and provided with meaningful growth opportunities. That’s where a talent management strategy comes in.
A talent management strategy can be divided into three main stages:
1 – Your company should start by mapping the talent pipeline and the skills of existing employees. It’s important to know where your employees are in their development and what skills they possess.
2) Step 2, is to identify the needs of your business in terms of where you want to be. This includes your workforce planning and the monitoring of skills on a company, team, and individual level. It’s important to forecast and plan what you hope to achieve, and by when.
3) Plan out the road map that will take you from A (mapping the “as is” state) to B ( a forecast of when you will achieve the “to be” state). See the talent management strategy section below for more on this.
In short, with a sound talent management strategy in place, you’re able to make data-driven decisions about the following activities:
- Recruitment
- Outsourcing
- Learning & Development
- Upskilling/Reskilling
- Retention
Managing talent can also be to do with retaining existing talent within your organization. To make sure the skills talented employees possess, remain within your company should they choose to leave. This is a great way to boost employee satisfaction and avoid employee burnout. Those employees who have been with you the longest, can retrain and be given a new lease of life within your company. This can revitalize an old job role, and improve your own employee engagement and retention.
Talent management also includes recruiting—hiring diverse talent with the right skillsets who can propel your company forward.
However, due to the shortage of external candidates, more and more recruitment is happening internally. As mentioned above, companies are looking to their existing employees to fill job roles and creating personalized development programs tailored to helping those candidates attain the digital skills they need to thrive in a new role. This means that the idea of what a job candidate is, and what recruitment, in general, is, are also changing.
DevSkiller TalentBoost is an advanced talent management platform designed to address the issues discussed here. A learning and development platform that allows businesses to accurately and objectively measure the skills of their employees—be it new or old skills. TalentBoost offers businesses a way to keep track of each employee’s success and development.
The talent strategy model is simplified below.
Learn more about DevSkiller TalentBoost
Talent management strategy model
There are three main stages that go into designing any talent management process:
- Mapping the existing state of your employees’ skills
- Defining the desired state
- Designing steps to go from the state “as is” to the state “to be”
Step 1: Skill mapping the “AS IS”
The first is to ‘map the existing state of your organization. This means working out at which skill level each employee is currently operating. This can involve assessing employee skills using:
- Self-assessment
- Supervisor assessment
- Automated technical skills assessment tests
Clearly defining the areas where they are more/less competent. Using multidimensional assessments makes the skill profile of the employee more objective.
Step 2: create the desired state (to be)
Put simply, this means deciding where you would like your company to be in the future, in relation to the digital skills and abilities of your employees.
This involves creating an ideal, target skill level. As a company, you can set the target skills level of your employees in some of the key components in the following ways:
– By observing global megatrends
– Reading industry reports
– Competitors analysis
– F2F interviews with company managers
– Internal surveys among employees
– Financial projections
– Company strategic objectives
Step 3: Take action
The third step is creating a process that will take your employees and your organization from step one to step two. From an organization lacking in digital skills to an organization where all employees possess the exact digital skills required of them.
‘Designing’ steps come in many shapes and forms:
- Career paths (incorporating both upskilling and reskilling strategies)
- Mentoring programs
- Tailored Learning & Development efforts instead of “shopping basket” style training
- Defining actual recruitment needs based on the company skills map
Improving the talent management process
When it comes to talent management there are several areas on which to focus your company’s attention. It’s not only about retraining the employees you already have within your company.
Talent management in recruitment
To begin with, a good talent management strategy starts by having the right people working for your company, which comes down to your recruitment and hiring process.
Properly define your hiring needs
To make sure you are attracting the best candidates, you need to have a streamlined and thorough recruitment process. Each role within your company has to be clearly defined, with precise skillsets, clear responsibilities, and expectations.
When it comes to digital skills, each role needs to be assigned its own set of digital skills (skillset) that your candidate should be expected to know in order to perform the role.
Map out skills to improve role-fit and project-fit
By mapping out the skills required for each role, as a company, you are quickly able to identify the kind of person who will work well within that role or project, as well as the specific skills they should possess. You will be able to plan out exactly the type of person you are looking to attract and be able to include this information in your job advertisement.
Talent management for employee retention
It’s not enough to attract the best new talent to your company. You also have to keep them there. One of the most effective ways to retain top talent from within your company is to have a reskilling/ upskilling initiative that will allow you to retrain current employees. Reskilling is especially important for obsolete skills and legacy technologies.
Designing personalized career paths
A talent management platform like DevSkiller TalentBoost easily allows for planned and well-organized employee development opportunities.
With a talent management platform, one of the first steps is to map out the skills required for a particular role, as well as to identify the digital skills possessed by each current employee.
So, you will be easily able to look at your current team of employees and identify the people who are closest in their skills, to that of the role you are trying to fill. In other words, you’ll be able to see who is close to the desired skillset due to the prerequisite skills they already have. This is knowns as a “skill leap”.
Once your company skill map is complete, you can identify people you would like to upskill to learn the additional skills needed for the role. Not only have you filled a vacant position, but you have also managed to retain talent within your organization.
Occasionally, just as some digital skills become integral to a role, others become obsolete as time passes. You may find there are employees in your organization that possess a lot of surplus skills that are now seemingly dormant. Either these employees can be left behind in the digital revolution with unused skills, or those skills can be mapped out to see exactly which areas they can improve in to stay up to date. Reskilling like this, allows organizations to take current employees and retrain them in completely different roles or to adapt their current roles to suit the changing world.
Digital skills mapping is essential in these instances, as it allows a company to easily identify the areas of their company that require the most attention and to readily offer employees access to the digital skills that will make sure that their roles remain integral to the company going forward.
Digital skills assessments
One area of focus for your organization when it comes to your talent management practices is digital skills assessments. How can your organization tell how competent an employee is in a certain skill, without some kind of skills assessment?
DevSkiller offers advanced technical skills assessments which accurately show the exact areas in which candidates are either proficient or lacking.
Employer branding
Your employer branding can play a huge role when it comes to your talent management strategy. At first glance, you might think ‘what has employer brand got to do with talent management?’ However, think of it this way, the better your employer branding, the more you will attract candidates based on the good reputation of your company. Being presented with a digital skills map along with a clear career path that outlines exactly what they can improve on and how they can progress within the company, is likely to be a huge selling point for your organization. This in turn, is great for creating a healthy company culture.
Not only when attracting new candidates either. If your current employees are given a clear development plan, upskilling opportunities, and a chance to push their careers forward, then this will improve staff morale and mean they are much more likely to recommend open positions in your company to their colleagues in the future, in person or on LinkedIn.
At a time when there are huge talent shortages across the technical world, your ability to market your company effectively as a place for employee progression and development, might be crucial for being able to continue to attract the right people.
Read –How to build strong employer branding in tech
Performance management
Part of your talent management process should be to offer rewards and recognition for employees who develop new skills. The obvious way to reward employees is with a salary increase or a bonus dependent on employee performance, and in this case, on skills learning.
However, for some, the opportunity to progress within the company is as much a draw as a raise in salary. A clear skills-management map can include incentives whereby an employee can attain a promotion based on them learning certain new digital skills.
Get ready for the future
A good talent management process doesn’t only focus on the skills needed for current roles. Digital skills being learned today, will be obsolete within a few years. For this reason, it is imperative to focus not only on present digital skills but also to keep an eye on newly developing digital skills. This requires having enough foresight in the digital world to be able to make predictions on what will be the crucial skills to possess in the future and to start making a plan to have your employees trained in these skills moving forward.
TalentBoost can help your company avoid the digital skills gap. Request a demo today and start mapping your company’s future— Request a demo
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