Talent Management: An Emerging Business Strategy

Many would say that talent management is a mature approach to building and sustaining a strong talent pipeline for companies.

Additionally, the term was popularized from a McKinsey publication in 1998 entitled, “War on Talent.” This study looked at organizations from around the globe and the best practices among global companies for how they manage a comprehensive talent management strategy.

According to the study, there are six practices that must be aligned to make an effective talent management strategy: talent review, recruiting, training, performance management, retention, and compensation and rewards.

Understandably, training is the most relevant of these to our readers. But from where I sit, talent management is still a very misunderstood strategy among training professionals. We don’t always know how we fit into the overall strategy since human resources (HR) has the overall responsibility of talent management. And, training is much larger than just HR.

Why? That’s because training lives in many organizations inside the company. For example, sales training usually resides in the sales organization, product training in the marketing, sales or customer service organization, and IT training within the IT group.

So, why is that an issue? Well it depends on who you ask, but the issue I find is that training organizations within the same enterprise are not always aligned with how they fit into the overall corporate strategy for talent management. The bottom line is that all training professionals have a responsibility to align themselves with the overall corporate mission, which includes the corporate objective for talent management.

The biggest lesson we’ve learned since the early days of talent management is how difficult it is to develop a comprehensive and sustainable talent management strategy. It requires many moving parts to work in unison.

There is still little we know today about what makes talent management efforts effective. To shed some light on the topic, our current issue of Training Industry Quarterly offers insights on what is happening related to talent management within training organizations.

Doug Harward

Doug Harward is the founder and CEO of Training Industry, Inc. He is internationally recognized as one of the leading strategists for training and outsourcing business models. He is respected as one of the industry’s leading authorities on competitive analysis for training services and works with international companies and new business start-ups in building training organizations.

Harward previously served as the Director of Global Learning for Nortel Networks where he led the industry’s largest global training outsourcing engagement with PricewaterhouseCoopers. He received the Chairman’s Global Award for Community Service for his work in developing integrated learning organization strategies within higher education, public schools and business. He has worked in the training industry for more than 25 years.

Harward received a MBA from the Fuqua School of Business at Duke University and a BSBA in Marketing from Appalachian State University.

Harward is co-author of the book “What Makes A Great Training Organization.”

Training Industry, Inc.

Talent Management: An Emerging Business Strategy

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