1. Talent Assessment

Sales assessment to identify and build sales capabilities in the organization will be a very meager skill in the year to come, considering that the shift will also be across sectors towards concept/solution selling rather than ‘pure product’ selling.

With hiring talent getting more and more difficult, organizations will concentrate upon building talent internally and will start the development focus right at the start and across all levels. This explains the next focus mentioned around Leadership Development. There will be succession planning related leadership potential assessment to plan and manage successors in organizations.

2. Leadership Development

Building talent pipeline in the junior and middle management level is turning to be a win-win investment for organizations and employees; employees develop skills and organizations are able to have talent home grown and at the same time manage this as a very important engagement tool. HiPo Development at the middle management will be eminent in the coming year.

The traditional development approach, which looks at a longer duration may not be sufficient since the need for talent is growing at an unprecedented rate. Hence, the focus will be on applying multiple tools and adopting a holistic approach towards development and integrated learning and leadership development approach for developing talent (the 50:25:25 – 3E /4E approach).

There will be more emphasis on new leader coaching and coaching of middle and senior leaders in critical roles. There is no room for leaders not to succeed or to wait and see how they progress; organizations will identify this as an opportunity and partner with the new hires at senior critical roles as well as with employees transitioned into new key roles right from the start and help them succeed.

Organizations will create leadership academy to build in-house talent across levels on a continuous basis to build the right kind of talent rather than hiring them externally. This will be the key for large organizations that have huge hiring needs.

3. Innovation and long term techniques for managing talent engagement, controlling attrition and improving productivity will be important and will have to be thought through, considering the fact that each organization is unique with its pace of growth, its culture and the multiple generation composition.

Talent being the new scarce commodity, organizations will need to have an USP to attract talent and define Employee Value Proposition for employees along with creating the ‘People Promise’ to manage attrition and build engagement.
Building a robust career development and career management framework and career directions for managing engagement and retention will be tools to manage engagement and control attrition from a long term perspective.
For MNCs and large Indian large conglomerates, looking at managing talent holistically at multi country levels or the group level from a long term perspective to optimize specific and niche skills will be the key.