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Talent Development: Why Knowledge Supervision is a Staple

Introduction

Employees are the most valuable asset of any organization. With agility becoming an integral part of every modern-day business, human resource departments have also had to transform. Organizations across the globe are now focusing on the internal talent development processes to enhance their employee output, get better performance results, introduce cross-functional teams and retain the best talent.

What is talent development, and what does it constitute?

As described above, talent development is a set of integrated HR functions designed to attract, develop, motivate and retain the best talent, thus converting them into valuable and tangible assets. Talent development also aims to generate sustainable growth of the organization and ensures that the employees meet their performance objectives.

Talent development generally involves a strategic plan engineered by the human resource department to help vertical heads align their existing resources with employee development, creating valuable output for individuals, stakeholders, and the company. These strategies constitute internal training programs, performance assessment, and knowledge transfer by the leadership.

As opposed to how it sounds, talent development operations lead to measurable, tangible results. Organizations are tasked with demonstrating that their talent development operations impart quantifiable value to their stakeholders and the community.

Talent development programs’ envisioned goals and results should be measurable and reflected at three levels; external (stakeholders), organizational, and individual contributions. All of this can be achieved by obtaining data from each talent development operation, comparing it against previous performance data, assessing the data for gaps, and finally working towards filling the gaps with a strategic plan in place.

How to Approach Talent Development

Understand the organization’s needs and collect data to evaluate how talent development will contribute to the requirements.

Your talent development framework has to be aligned with the needs of the organization. For this, you need to identify deliverables for each stakeholder of your company and align them with the results of your talent development programs. Itrecentis essential to define measurable performance parameters and the current performance gaps resulting from a lack of talent development framework to ensure benefits.  Following this, you need to compare your current performance against the perceived performance after deploying talent development programs.

Identify the collective goals of your employees and your organization. Use this to justify the cost incurred while implementing the talent development framework.

Let’s assume your organization has constantly been trying to improve its revenue in a particular area. Despite having superior products, you are still unable to surpass the performance of your competitors.

In order to use talent development in this situation, examine whether the root cause is related to the lack of skill development among the employees, gaps in your knowledge management system, or any other internal areas. Objectively examine these factors and see if they can be solved by implementing your development framework. Remember that stakeholders are always looking for value in their investment, and it’s your responsibility to provide the same.

What outputs can you expect from implementing your talent development operations?

Increased employee performance: Deploying a talent development framework will improve employee performance and productivity. It will also ensure that there are fewer performance-related grievances among your employees. Additionally, talent development operations will elevate employee engagement within the organization and ensure that your top talent stays longer because they will see tangible results and the scope of growth within the organization.

Improved business performance: Skill development programs will add to the performance and productivity of the employees, thus improving the overall business performance. Another benefit that talent development frameworks offer, especially in highly demanding work environments, is that the employees acquire specialized knowledge to provide a continuous workflow.

Enhanced client satisfaction: Talent development ensures that there is a systematic approach to management within the organization. This means that the client’s needs are communicated and met efficiently, thus resulting in higher client satisfaction.

Attract the best talent: Having a strategic approach towards talent management allows organizations to attract better talent from the industry and establish a brand where employees see the immense growth potential for themselves.

Conclusion

As our workplaces become more dynamic, organizations have to maintain the rapid pace of development, beginning with their most important asset, their employees. At Edcast, we consistently empower our clients with the best talent experience platform in the industry. Our team of experienced professionals is here to help businesses attract, develop and retain a high-performance and future-ready workforce.

Reskilling and Upskilling: A Tactical Response to Erratic Skills Demand

As our workplaces evolve with time, multi-tasking has become an integral part of organizational culture. Cross-functional departments are imperative to building a successful business, and it has become essential for us to keep up with our industries’ fast and demanding pace. So, how can you ensure that? The only way to approach dynamism, change, and development is by upskilling and reskilling.

Though not a new concept, the need for a superior Learning Management System (LMS) has never been more crucial than now. When the pandemic struck, most businesses were not equipped to deal with the uncertainty of the situation, and employers were slow to adapt. As a result, companies faced the consequences of loss of revenue, loss of clientele, and a disadvantaged workforce struggling to keep the business afloat.  Hence the need for a solid LMS was even more prominent.

Now the question arises: What is upskilling and reskilling? And how can an up-to-date LMS help in efficiently upskilling and reskilling the performance of your team? Let’s find out.

What is upskilling?

Upskilling is the practice of making the employees of an organization a high-value disseminating asset. At the core lies developing new skill sets and updating existing skills with the latest practices. The end goal of these skill training practices is to empower employees to perform new tasks, swiftly adjust to any shift in the organizational structure, come up with impactful solutions for the consumer needs, and ultimately enhance the collective productivity of the organization.

How do you approach upskilling?

There are a few things to keep in mind when planning and implementing an LMS in your organization:

Understand the skill gap in your team members. You can do so by identifying skill gaps in individual members of your team or comparing the group’s overall performance with pre-decided parameters.

Give your team members a clear picture of how these skill training programs will help them with their professional growth in the company. Make sure that you take into account their personal career goals and align those with your projected outcomes.

Make the process easy and accessible. Maintain a healthy flow of discussion amongst your team members. Ensure that they do not feel isolated in the process. Encourage your colleagues to break out of their silos and work as a collective.

Traditional learning management systems are not often equipped to handle the employee and program-centric requirements required for upskilling and reskilling. In the sections below, we will explore how we can address this.

Choosing an LMS tailor-made for your organization

Whether you want to develop new skill sets or further develop the existing ones, choosing a flexible learning management system is a given. The program should be designed in a way that is best suited for everyone to utilize. Some of the things you need to keep in mind include:

The skills that you want to develop and in what order of priority. E.g., When the COVID-19 pandemic hit, organizations were forced to adapt to virtual working. But the problem with this was that many employees who were not so tech-savvy were facing difficulties when trying to do menial tasks like clocking in their attendance, accessing information, and even conducting and attending virtual meetings. In this case, the priority of organizations was to walk their employees through the virtual work process and equip them with the correct information. In addition, companies need to identify essential skills through a skill assessment for every employee. This will help them understand where its employees stand regarding their understanding and expertise in a particular domain.

Monitor learning and develop a workflow for your teammates to actualize their new skills. The LMS should be such that it makes individual learning easy and the progress of individual team members visible. In addition, you should record non-technical training sessions like mentoring sessions, job experience, in-house workshops, brainstorming sessions, and leadership training with the LMS. By integrating these, you will understand if these learnings are making an impact and producing tangible results.

Make sure that you build a competent learning atmosphere. After your employees understand the system and have finished the skill training programs, use the LMS to track their personal development in terms of their careers. This will allow the employees to have an agency of their skill development and give you more time to focus on overall business performance. This will also allow you to establish a culture of continuous learning amongst the employees seamlessly.