5 Top Trends in Organizational Talent & Learning Management

For the past 12 years, I’ve been working within human resources, in constant contact with a variety of companies from different business areas and dimensions. This has granted me a unique opportunity to analyse and review several talent management trends currently going on.

Talent Management in Review

In a globalized world where we are constantly adapting to new trends and facing different challenges, I believe it would be helpful to share my experiences and knowledge of these. Doing this through an analysis of the major challenges companies currently face and reviewing the new trends that which companies to overcome the challenges.

Currently organizations face several critical challenges, mainly:

• Short supply of true leaders
• Need to develop and engage employees, thus motivating them to achieve their best performance
• High turnover

Retaining and Empowering Your Talent

Finding, and keeping talent is now one of the biggest strategic business priorities.

Nevertheless, most companies still struggle to retain, grow and attract top performers and therefore are unable to build long lasting relationships with their employees in order to respond effectively to a constantly changing and competitive environment. To overcome this challenge, it is crucial for companies to rethink their talent strategies, along with their learning and performance management processes.

As such, leading companies have abandoned traditional methods in favor of more modern solutions, which involve embracing technology innovations to engage talent, with a renewed focus on improving and rewarding performance.

With the current challenges in mind, here are the new trends companies are most interested in to successfully overcome these challenges.

There are 5 key trends to consider:

1: Mobile Technology

Going mobile has transformed the way companies interact, collaborate and work. It is one of the most distinctive factors in the competition for talent and in human resources management.

2: Social Learning

Adopting a social learning culture provides the company with an incomparable level of knowledge and power. Connecting people with deep knowledge on specific areas makes the strategies and efforts of high-performing employees multiply in the business outcome. It also provides the organization agility in responding to a changing business environment.

3: Adaptive Learning

Adaptive Learning is a methodology that breaks from traditional learning methods. It allows learners to achieve learning at their own pace. A management role can adapt the learning plans according to each employee`s needs, growing their interaction and motivation. This allows the employees to build their confidence and expertise, resulting in an increase in their engagement, as well as the employer and employee’s overall combined expertise.

4: Alignment of Corporate and Individual Objectives

It is commonly known employees must be aligned with their companies’ business goals, but this has not always been a reciprocal relationship. Meaning that individual goals and career plans also should be considered. Having the right tools in place to align the employee’s goals and motivations (career planning) with the business strategy will reduce turnover and will enhance the employee’s engagement and develop top performers.

5: Measuring Effectiveness

It’s important to ensure any talent strategy supports the business needs by having an accurate measurement functionality in place. Companies need to have tools which allow them to measure both business and learning metrics. For example, using questionnaires to measure employee’s satisfaction, engagement, and turnover and at the same time assessing revenue per full time employee.

In Summary

Companies need to adapt their learning strategies and talent processes to face today`s business and workforce challenges to overcome them successfully.

Traditional models can`t bridge the gap between employees and performance, so it becomes a priority to:

a) Select the right technology provider to implement the new trends or organizational management system.

b) Collaborate within the business, engaging all departments and areas to ensure an effective top management alignment, using real time analytical data to support every day decisions.

c) Understanding the importance of each employee, as the most important pieces of the puzzle. Companies need to pursue an alignment of the individual and business needs in order to create synergy between them.

SuccessFactors as a Talent Management Solution

Having worked with several different talent software providers I have found SuccessFactors to be one of the best talent management solutions, which comprises all the contemporary human resources trends mentioned above.

The mobile and tablet suite allows both the employee and manager to effectively manage all the talent process.

The learning suite is flexible and can be built to accommodate each employee`s needs, communicating in real time with all talent modules ensuring the alignment with the development of the employee in agreement with his/her career plan

A key highlight worth mentioning is the workforce planning and analytics module, which provides real time data to assess the effectiveness on the go.

For any questions or comments regarding these tools, please feel free to send me an e-mail at Sofia Simoes

Sofia is an experienced HR consultant with over 12 years of experience in the field of SAP/SuccessFactors. She has specialised in HR from an internal organisational perspective and by providing guidance and advice to clients who choose to implement SAP SuccessFactors. She has worked on multiple SAP SuccessFactors projects with modular expertise in SuccessFactors Talent and Learning Management Systems