Surveys show that employers are increasing their training budgets in order to meet their talent needs. But money alone isn’t enough to achieve quality talent development results: increased employee retention, productivity and engagement, as well improved succession planning.
In particular, as an employer, you must meet the three talent development imperatives listed below to get quality results.
You must have significant organizational commitment
Succeeding at talent development requires more than acquiring the right tools and providing quality learning materials. Many companies fail to create a culture of learning. The consequence is engagement in the talent development process is poor, and so are the outcomes.
How do you create a culture of learning? Take concrete actions that demonstrate the great value your organization places in talent development. These include:
- Make training and development for all employees
- Recognize employees who learn new skills and improve their performance
- Hire internally
- Give employees input in the process, and offer and encourage self-learning
You must have patience with training and learning
There’s no getting around it—talent development takes time, and must be ongoing. It’s easy for more immediate priorities to take precedence, and derail training and learning activities. Prevent this showing your organizational commitment, insisting that training development activities move forward.
You must effectively manage the training process
Employees, supervisors and training managers are all involved in training, and all need to be on the same page about the training process—the current status, next steps, etc.
This can be terribly difficult for HR and training managers to manage. Management difficulties cause delays and confusion in the process that slow talent development efforts to a crawl, and cause frustration among all involved. These problems are common among organizations that are trying to manage training with paper or Excel. As a result, it’s critical to have the proper training management tools.
Want to get better talent development results? Read our new article, “3 Steps To Achieve Talent Development That Drives Organizational Success.”