The second chorus in the famous song by The Who states, “Well, who are you? I really wanna know. Tell me, who are you? ‘Cause I really wanna know.” And while I don’t have the great vocals of Roger Daltrey, let me try and point out some of the interpretation that the IACCM data provides.
Here are some worrisome trends: Clearly, given that 50% of you are over 46 means that this is an aging profession. And if it is not attracting a younger demographic currently, it will continue down this trend. It also means that we will soon have a major KCM (Knowledge Continuity Management) problem on our hands as we all suffer from severe brain drain. This aging of our profession has some serious implications…both for the short term and the long term.
52% of you feel there is no career path while the same percentage also feels that their company will not invest in their development. 46% feel that there are no clear and meaningful rewards for high performance. You dislike poor leadership and lack of clarity. I’ll stop there as the picture is sounding bleak already. Imagine having to recruit against that backdrop. And not only will you have trouble recruiting people but an even harder time in retaining them. This is why focusing on recruiting challenges is only attacking the symptom and not the cause. We must understand that to solve these issues, we have to approach it as a system and address all the domains of Talent Management.
The four most important skills identified included communications, problem solving and negotiation skills yet you have very little confidence that your organization will actually train you on these. Unfortunately, most training programs these days focus on process, analytical or technical skills and stay away from the dreaded “soft” skills….exactly the opposite of what they should be doing. You also dislike the lack of investment in people by your company. In addition, most training programs are not focused on acquiring competencies (application of new skills and behaviors) which require not only training but some form of coaching to actually apply them.
The content of your job is apparently administrative in nature while you crave much more meaningful and challenging work. Given that most of you are also individual contributors that combination leads to a fairly high level of dissatisfaction.
Lack of a career path also means that you have no high motivation for development activities. It also points to a general lack of succession planning activities inside your organizations. Limited career paths coupled with lack of succession planning means very little mobility (vertical or lateral) and that will always lead to stagnation in the group as well as recruiting challenges. Lack of motivation coupled with lack of mobility will almost always lead to your best and brightest choosing to go elsewhere.
While it was not all bleak, it is fairly obvious that the state of Talent Management has been fairly precarious and continues to be right now. The situation may be fairly dire given the kinds of recruiting numbers that we are starting to hear from some of our clients. Unfortunately, those types of recruiting needs point to some systemic issues across the various domains of Competency Based Talent Management.
What solutions to do you propose for these challenges?
Dalip
PS: If you are interested in continuing the conversation with us, we have a few upcoming initiatives that might interest you.
- Results of the Executive Forum we just facilitated at IACCM Global Forum for Contracting & Commercial Excellence on Talent Management.
- On November 4th, the Next Practices Xchange hosted by us is exclusively focused on Competency Based Talent Management
- 6 part blog series on CBTM
- Major research project to not identify the problem one more time but to identify Next Practices to solve the problems
- Webinar with IACCM on CBTM
- White Paper to focus on Next Practices in CBTM