People are the center of running a high-competitive organization and advanced society. Identifying, creating and developing talent are distinct actions and continuous efforts for talent management.
Mind crafting, knowledge-updating, personalized training & coaching, skill-sharpening, and professional portfolio development, etc, are all crucial steps in transforming from cookie-cutter to gap-minding potentiality development.
Their "purpose" is to feel accomplished as they are using talent properly and doing meaningful work to not only make themselves feel good but also create value to the organizations, nations and human societies. Raw talent is innate, it takes the immense amount of time and hard work that most "naturally talented" people have committed to developing their talents, sharpening their skills and shaping a differentiated set of capabilities to deliver consistent results. .
Thinking techniques: We are what we continue thinking, the "mind" represents our consciousness and awareness. The individual’s “thinking box" is a mental construct made up of personal and environmental components that one operates within. Cognitive competency refers to a growth mindset, logic, or creativity, etc. You can teach others knowledge, can you coach them on how to think?
There is a certain set of thinking techniques such as critical thinking skills, systems thinking methodology, decision-making logic which can be trained to a certain degree. However, it depends on each individual to practice their thinking skills and improve cognitive abilities. Growth mindset and cognitive intelligence are in strong demand to ride learning curves and make the progressive movement. You can train for knowledge or certain thinking techniques, but not on wisdom – people need to figure out based on their own perception, knowledge, experience, etc.
Career/life experience enrichment: The journey of life/career is accumulated experience. When people’s everyday experience is one of frustration, boredom, and disengagement , they cannot stimulate their intelligence actively, sometimes use up all their energy just dealing with the obstacles. Thus, one of the important perspectives of talent development is to enrich people’s career or life experience, so they can apply their learned knowledge to real world problem-solving, learn lessons from what they observe, experience, experiment, etc.
People can also improve their prioritization and time management skills, avoid being interrupted too frequently and focus on things that can make significant differences. If you have a fulfilling or upward career and enriched life experience, you are doing something you are good at, perhaps productivity comes automatically and hence, stress will be lowered rather than gone in most cases, you make continuous progress physically, psychologically.
Personalized training/coaching: Besides self-reflection and self-learning, professional training is part of the scenario for talent development. Training should be a means to an end for improving competence and increased workforce capability. Personalized training would be more effective and efficient as people can select the context, fitting styles for their personal needs or schedules.
Performance based on knowledge or hard competency training would be easily observed because you can check directly and immediately after the training is completed. It is not easy to calculate the ROI especially on soft competency. It takes time to monitor and prove it. From “one size fits all” to personalized training, learning & training need to be an integral component of talent development. The talent management needs to dig deeper by pondering: What intervention makes a difference? Training, teaching? coaching? Role modeling? What do those interventions make a difference to? The question is to what extent that the trained employee wants or commits to implement what s/he has learned. Otherwise, it will be considered as a waste of time. Developing personalized training, fine tuning a progressive climate for learning and growth takes a structural effort, rather than a few random initiatives because it instills a culture that constant evolution and learning is taken seriously.
Skill-sharpening with solid digital footprints and continuous deliveries: There are different levels of professional skills and competency development. From linear skills to integral competency, people become more fluent, intuitive and productive in what they are doing, and they are more confident to keep improving their skill sets. Professional capability is underpinned by various hard and soft factors such as talent, process, motivation, special training, etc to achieve capability coherence.
The professional core competency with fluency at the higher level are more complex in development, sophisticated to copy and faster to integrate. Because you need to connect wider dots, explore adjacent knowledge domains, or integrate seemingly irrelevant, but in fact necessary skills for growing the next level of expertise to fit the role you intend to play. High level of professional competency cannot be transferred because of the degree of originality, unique expertise, and high professionalism that people go with.
Professional portfolio development: Contemporary leaders and professionals should build solid expertise, develop a professional portfolio and establish a strong professional reputation. The skills developed based on people’s natural talent are more easily scalable to build their unique professional competency. In fact, creating meaningful, relevant, and compelling differentiation in the mind of the audience is the challenge.
Every professional has their own journey of growth either personally or professionally based on their own perception, talent, education, life experience, training, and refinement. You aren't sacrificing the long-term viability of the portfolio for short-term rewards. Professional portfolio development is more as a personalization process for conveying a professional image of who you are, your mindset, expertise, or anything you would like others to know about yourself, to prepare for the next stage of personal adventure and growth.
From a talent management perspective, professional skill development is something that depends on the individual's wish as per the organization's standards. The challenge today is for organizations to build a lasting capacity for continuous learning in order to build a culture of learning within the organization. The next talent development practice will be not only recognizing the talent, but also developing innovative, personalized solutions with flexible process and methodology, as today’s global workforces pursues freedom, independence, and autonomy, purpose and mastering of work, to make career more fulfilling and life more meaningful.
