How Does E-learning Aid Talent Management?

E-learning Network, London, 30 March 2007

E-learning network events attract a mixed audience of buyers and suppliers, and it is always instructive to see, from the turnout at any given event, with which of the two groups a given topic has proved more popular. It was suppliers who turned out in force for Talent Management.

This perhaps reflects the progress of Talent Management as a buzzword along the 'Hype Cycle', which Don Taylor of Infobasis lucidly characterised for us in its three phases of 'bandwagon, gravy train and car crash'. Talent Management is a buy-side bandwagon fast approaching the status of a potential supplier gravy train - and already a few of the more nervous passengers might be wondering whether anyone thought to pack the air bags.

Judging from this conference, however, the fate of this particular vehicle is going to lie firmly with the buy-side. An 'end-to-end, turnkey solution for Talent Management' is something we are unlikely to see, since Talent Management is a big, strategic issue, going to the heart of how today's organisations are changing in response to macro-economic drivers such as global demographics, the increasing virtualisation of processes and greater international mobility of labour.

Siloed

One of the major challenges this gives for organisations implementing Talent Management is that the issues it needs to address are siloed within the organisations themselves at present. Given this situation, top team buy-in would seem to be a critical success factor for a Talent Management initiative, a point which came out strongly in the presentation by Jane Smith of Mouchel Parkman. Even with strong commitment and communication from the top that Jane enjoyed, however, in looking externally for solutions to the challenges presented by Talent Management, buyers are liable to find a supplier market that replicates its own silos. This is a challenge for e-learning.

One advantage that Talent Management does have is that it isn't Human Capital Management. Where HCM has proved a bit of a turn-off for the HR community, Talent Management is more inspirational, more (dare we say it) 'touchy-feely'. It's 'hotter'.

What is Talent Management?

So what is it? There seemed to be an almost alarming amount of consensus on definition between the speakers. Many organisations do Talent Management without necessarily saying that they do Talent Management, but there seemed to be agreement that it had to be a strategic and deliberate set of activities. In terms of those activities, roughly speaking, it breaks down into:

• Talent identification
• Recruitment and retention
• Learning and developement

While other people might subdivide it differently, these activities seem to be common to most approaches.

Talent issues particular and diverse

So much for the 'What?' When it comes to the 'how', 'who', and even the 'why', however, it became clear that organisations' talent issues tend to be highly particular and diverse. Meena Anand of Standard Chartered Bank was grappling with a 28-35% attrition rate, and the challenges of developing talent across a global workforce (60,000 employees across 59 territories), while Jane Smith of Mouchel Parkman (with a relatively paltry 17% churn rate) seemed more concerned with managing poor performance.

Meena Arnand gave a good example of how these particular problems can give rise to creative solutions. Faced with an ongoing chronic shortage of private bankers, Standard Chartered has become good at identifying the attributes of a good private banker and looking for those attributes in people from other walks of life; recruiting ex-pro-tennis-players and ex-military people and filling in their financial knowledge through training.

That brings us to the role of e-learning in Talent Management. It is clear from looking at the three-item subject breakdown above that e-learning is bound to play a slightly limited role, most of it within the Learning & Development piece. This became clear as we moved towards the supplier presentations in the afternoon.

Assault with a deadly pick 'n' mix

Jill Mahony of IBM spanned the client/supplier divide, having worked on internal talent management as HR Partner, but also having advised clients in external work. Though her exposition of IBM's own talent issues was interesting, the rest of her presentation was a little unfocused: a lot of the time it consisted of firing questions at her slightly bemused audience - bemused because the questions were clearly phrased with large organisations in mind, and most of the audience - being suppliers - were in companies with ten employees or less. Later in the afternoon David Kesbey of Academee bemused us even more by firing not questions but sweets.

Apparently this was a demonstration of blended learning, and the colour of your sweet wrapper was significant, but I must admit that initially, at least, I was more preoccupied with making sure I didn't get a sherbet lemon in the eye. The talent portal demonstrated had some interesting interactive diagnostics, however, proving that e-learning has a wider role to play in Talent Management than just the training piece.

Some insights as to the character of that wider role had also been given by the panel session in the middle of the day.

• E-learning allows the communication of a consistent approach to Talent Management across an organisation
• In a large, dispersed organisation this consistency of message can help to spread 'gold service' out beyond the hub, with webinars reaching outlying offices which might otherwise have failed to participate in the best training available to the organisation
• E-learning can spread a more personalised, self-service approach to development: helping people 'learn how to learn'
• The personal, private nature of e-learning can make it useful to senior managers who might not want to expose a lack of tech-literacy to a wider audience in the classroom

Show report by John Helmer