Economic Downturn: Managing Talent

Talent Development...

In the currently changed business landscape, it is imperative for companies to form a strategic view of the risks that would impede on the survival of the organisation. One of these business risks concerns the challenge of sustaining key competencies of the organisation amidst a flurry of downsizing, rightsizing or rationalisation. Developing training and recruitment programmes and focusing on leadership and coaching skill programmes can help to combat the decline in employee quality that will otherwise occur if these programmes are not closely aligned to the business strategy and needs and assessed accordingly.

In practice only a small percentage of the companies, according to various industrial surveys, actually assess the effectiveness of their training investment. At a time of high risk and continued talent crunch in the key sectors of the economy, such laise-à-faire approach will severely jeopardise the company’s capability to be agile, innovative and fast in responding to the market demands. Instead, now is the time for companies to assume a rigorous and disciplined approach to proactively identify competence related risks and to address them systematically in order to safeguard key competencies needed for their business.

Human capital risk, or training investment portfolio management, is NOT an administrative function which can be relegated to the backroom. Instead, it is a strategic function that requires a systemic response from the boardroom.

Leading companies, such as Cisco, IBM, International Paper, concurrent to downsizing, embark on redesign roles and responsibilities coupled with strategic learning processes to improve cross-functional alignment, strengthen performance capability and deliver better results. Training and development programmes help employee morale, increase long-term productivity and provide people with the competence necessary to carry out redesigned jobs that tend to have greater spans of control and deeper layers of process. In emerging economies where talent markets are relatively small, continued investment in effective and efficient training is a must.

Is your training and development process up to the challenge? Do you have the next generation HRD and training management system to deliver results during the economic downturn with reduced resources and to nurture and maintain key competencies for the future?

In this kind of a scenario the answers to the above questions becomes critical and vital for any organization.