Professional development opportunities key to retaining talented employees

Professional development opportunities key to retaining talented employees

SHRM releases its 2006 survey on talent management

More than half of human resource (HR) professionals surveyed said their organization had talent management initiatives in place, according to a 2006 Talent Management Survey released by the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM). The survey was based on responses from 384 HR professionals in the USA.

Among respondents who reported that their organizations had talent management initiatives, more than 75 per cent indicated they were top priority for their organization. HR professionals also said that these initiatives have their greatest impact on recruitment, employees feeling valued, aligning employees with the mission of the organization, and providing adequate professional development opportunities.

“There is increasing pressure from the global market to compete with workforces of the highest caliber in order to succeed” said Susan R. Meisinger, President and CEO of the SHRM. “Effective talent management drives that success by recruiting the best and brightest, providing developmental opportunities and strategies to retain employees by actively engaging them in achieving an organization’s goals.”

With an increasingly diverse workforce and growing global competition,organizations are looking to talent management as a means of ensuring quality and consistency in the workforce. Therefore, it is important that employees are trained to perform their jobs at a high level, and that ongoing training is budgeted to further develop employees’ skills. Of those organizations that have talent management initiatives, 65 per cent have a formal budget in place for training. The survey also found that employees are more likely to stay with their organization if they are offered professional development opportunities.

However, HR professionals also indicated that there remain areas where talent management initiatives need to be improved:

• creating a deeper reservoir of successors at every level (25 per cent);

• creating a culture that makes employees want to stay with the organization(17 per cent);

• decreasing existing gaps in employees’ competency levels (17 per cent).

A full copy of the survey is available at: www.shrm.org.