Learning's Role in a Talent Management Strategy.

In every market segment, in every country, in every economy, companies are searching for talent. In 2008, the Adecco Institute surveyed more than 5,000 HR executives on topics including skill shortages, career management, knowledge management and lifelong learning. The research concluded that talent management will be the single most important focus of HR and learning and development moving forward.

Wikipedia defines talent management as "the process of developing and fostering new workers through on-boarding, developing and keeping current workers and attracting highly skilled workers at other companies to come to work for your company. Companies that are engaged in talent management (human capital management) are strategic and deliberate in how they source, attract, select, train, develop, promote and move employees through the organization."

By this definition, talent management can encompass a wide range of responsibilities, and learning plays a key role. An effective talent management strategy will consider exactly what that role will be, but first talent leaders must determine what value learning will play in the organization, and how in conjunction with talent management, it will be defined and handled.

Typically, ownership falls to the vice president of HR or the CLO. However, some companies are combining the roles and creating a vice president of talent management.

A Strong Foundation

An effective learning strategy will depend on a strong foundation of technology in support of enterprise- or department-wide talent management programs. To begin, make an inventory of existing software solutions.

In most cases, organizations approach this technology phase in one of two ways. They may have ERP applications that handle all talent management components, but may not be best-in-class in all areas. Or they may have an ERP outfitted with separate best-in-class applications to handle specialized components such as learning management and competency management.

In either case, the goal is the same. Make sure all the applications "talk to each other" and that the user interface is clean and simple. The best way to streamline the user interface is to use a portal that enables access to and interaction with all files, applications, content and people relevant to learning and talent management efforts.

Portals deliver highly personalized experiences that deliver talent management information to the end user based on applications, roles, workflows and other security permissions upon logging in. This single sign-on design prevents the user from having to log in to each application separately and delivers all functionalities in one standard interface.

Of the eight components that typically compose talent management - workforce planning, workforce acquisition, performance management, career development, succession planning, competency management, learning management and compensation management - learning plays a part in five - performance management, career development, succession planning, competency management and learning management.

Health benefits organization Cigna has been effectively leveraging integrated, end-to-end talent management practices for several years, including wrapping them into strategic business planning. Linking end-to-end talent management activities with strategic business planning is critical to ensure the talent required to lead the business proactively and in concert with forecasted changes in market context is in place and performing successfully.

Because learning is so essential to the success of its talent management strategies, Cigna has embraced it throughout the employee life cycle. As trite as it may sound, learning needs to be available anytime, anywhere - and in a variety of methods appropriate to organizational culture and individual employee learning styles.

Further, it is imperative an organization's leaders not only value learning, but they must promote traditional learning efforts and new delivery methods that marry learning to day-to-day task execution and business operations. Only when these objectives are met can learning agility be achieved and individuals be able to perform and produce in ways that benefit the organization, and the individual, most.

Refocus Learning and Development for Talent Management

Historically, learning and development organizations have consisted of functionally aligned teams that reactively focused on business unit requests. In a talent management strategy, the learning and development organization's responsibility must shift to align with the most critical strategic priorities of the company and workforce. The focus should now be on:

a) Integrating learning with work.

b) Determining current and future workforce learning needs.

c) Targeting all stakeholders.

d) Promoting on-demand learning that helps drive continuous learning and a high-performing culture.

This requires talent leaders to integrate learning with daily work tasks and often requires active coaching and frequent feedback from managers.

This leader-led learning is vital to the success of an organization because average workers will spend less than 10 percent of the time in a formal learning environment. Therefore, the majority of their learning will be informal and come from their managers and other leaders and employees, or through their own experiences on the job.

Learning's role is to coach while the managers teach, and managers can use their experiences to teach workers in ways that learning professionals only dream about. Employees today are eager to hear from successful executives about what works and doesn't work in their organizations and to hear answers to questions such as, "What are the best practices?" and, "What are the innovative things being done across the organization?"

When considering current and future workforce needs, learning and development professionals should help define competencies and pivotal roles. Competencies are the knowledge, skills and abilities needed to perform a specific job. Knowing these will help talent managers with everything from workforce planning and acquisition to succession and compensation planning.

Those who have been in the learning and development field for a long time may remember a similar effort was undertaken in the 1980s and early '90s called "job and task analysis." Leaders created large databases of skills and knowledge for numerous job positions and soon realized that, as quickly as job responsibilities changed, they did not have the budgets or the workforces to maintain comprehensive job and task analyses.

Today, competencies have replaced job and task analysis, and talent leaders are smarter in how they select and implement them. Best practices in competency management involve developing competencies for only a few select roles, typically leadership roles and specialized positions. Job-specific competencies should be confined to pivotal roles, jobs such as sales and customer service, for example, that directly touch the customer.

The number and types of competencies in a model will depend on the nature and complexity of work, along with the culture and values of the organization in which the work takes place. Typically, competencies are limited from five to 15; more than 15 becomes unmanageable.

Target All Stakeholders

Texas Instruments (TI) is preparing to roll out development blueprints: competency-based development recommendations applicable to every employee in the company. The organization identified core, critical capabilities for team member, team leader/manager, mid-level leader and senior-leader roles. Now development recommendations can be applied to any business unit, and they focus on learning through experiences with suggested relationships, coursework, assessment and feedback.

Within each of the four jobs, TI recognizes employees may be new to a role, in the role, preparing for a new role and/or high potential. The blueprints provide employees, managers and talent leaders with a variety of ideas for development with the intention to "meet each employee where they are.." Separately, specific development recommendations are given for each critical capability on each blueprint.

Promote Communication and On-Demand Learning

In organizations looking to leverage learning to improve talent management, a key strategy is to improve communications and culture. Improving communication is best achieved using Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and forums. These strategies allow continual opportunities for learning and supplement formal learning events.

The learning and development piece of the talent organization can take the lead by incorporating Web 2.0 technologies into learning portals to foster collaboration. Employees can be encouraged to collaborate online before or after scheduled learning events. If successful, the learning portal can become the focal point to improve communication throughout the organization.

Improving communication is difficult enough inside the organization. When the boundaries expand outside the organization, learning and development can become a large part of the solution by extending the learning portal to external stakeholders. This allows a selected portion of the company's knowledge to become available outside the firewall, and employees and external stakeholders can communicate.

Some of the highest-ranking executives at companies such as Cisco, Oracle, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard and Boeing write periodic entries in their online blogs. Curious readers can learn about Oracle's Group Vice President Judson Althoff and his meetings with partners in Japan, India and New York City. Or they can get a video sneak peek from GM Vice Chairman Bob Lutz at the vehicles GM will be launching during the North American International Auto Show. Through these blogs and videos, everyone can learn from industry masters by seeing how they view and react to current trends in their industries.

In these tough economic times, learning and talent organizations will be continuously tested to prove their value to the organization. As the talent management space potentially merges HR roles with those of learning and development, learning leaders have an unprecedented opportunity to cement the value of their skills for company leaders.

Because talent management will play such a critical role in organizational performance and competitiveness moving forward - and because so much of talent management is defined by learning and development - learning leaders are well-positioned to lead the charge to higher workforce performance.

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[About the Author: Don Duquette is executive vice president, learning solutions for General Physics Corp., a global performance improvement company.]