Talent development is the process of building upon an employee’s skillsets to advance individual competency or growth within the organization. Effective talent development programs help employees understand their roles better and actively work to gain the skills needed to be successful in their current or future roles.
Talent Development Practices
The leading talent development practices include talent strategy, buy/borrow/build approaches, and the use of technology in onboarding, training, and development.
APQC conducted a study in 2021 to further explore how organizations employ talent development practices and discovered:
- Organizations vary in their talent development capabilities and outcomes.
- Organizations are divided in terms of their learning budgets and adoption of technology and analytics to support talent development.
- Organizations have different levels of success when it comes to having the skills needed to match emerging business opportunities.
Read key research takeaways in APQC’s Talent Development Practices Survey Highlights.
Talent Development Roles
Understanding talent development roles and activities is critical to ensure success. When thinking about how roles and activities might be performed in your organization’s future state HR function, APQC recommends considering these roles as a starting point:
- HR leadership—lead the HR function and set HR strategy.
- HR centers of excellence—specialize in an HR process area such as talent acquisition, talent development, workforce planning, etc.; are responsible for process and program design within that area and for using their expertise to support the work of HR business partners.
- HR business partners—advise business leaders and managers on the talent strategy and design and delivery of related HR programs and services, drawing upon expertise from HR centers of excellence.
- HR operations—handle administrative and transactional aspects of HR; larger organizations often standardize and centralize HR operations roles within a shared services organization
Learn more about HR roles from APQC’s How Best-in-Class HR Functions Are Structured and HR Operating Model Trends.
DEI and Talent Development
Diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives present a unique opportunity to rethink talent development approaches. In a recent study on diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI), APQC identified three talent development activities that the best-in-class do much more commonly than other organizations, leading to significantly better talent development outcomes.
Here are the three best-in-class activities:
- Have all employees participate in unconscious bias training.
- Train managers to conduct objective and consistent performance evaluations.
- Ensure all HR employees participate in HR-specific DEI training.
Learn why these activities are essential and explore considerations for implementation in APQC’s DEI And Talent Development: Top 3 Actions of Best in Class.