How to Create a Talent Development Strategy

Talent keeps your organization going. Name a goal, and you’ll find talent is essential for getting there. Many leaders assume that building their talent pool begins with hiring and ends with retaining the talent they have, but that approach ignores something crucial: talent development.

With a talent development strategy in place, you can promote internally to fill more senior roles as they open up, empower team members to take on more complex tasks, and only dip into your hiring budget when it’s truly necessary.

By building up the talent you already have, you can get more out of your teams and shoot for bigger business goals. Not to mention that you’ll be having a direct hand in your people’s career development, helping them reach their full potential.

Here’s how.

What is talent development?

Talent development refers to continuous efforts organizations make to help employees upgrade existing skills, build new ones, and become stronger contributors to broader business goals. This involves training, coaching, mentorships, networking, and more. Not all of these things necessarily need to be provided by the organization internally, but they might be made available at a discounted rate or facilitated through the organization’s network.

A talent development strategy covers all the efforts an organization makes to build up its workforce’s skills. This involves making the right resources available to employees and matching up opportunities for development with the organization’s needs.

The value of long-term talent development

Training up your workforce has several advantages for both the organization and your team.

Benefits of a talent development strategy for employees

While not all employees might initially jump at the chance for extra training or other talent development resources, there’s a lot they stand to gain from it. Here’s what’s in it for them:

• Better productivity and efficiency: When employees are inherently motivated to be more productive, whether that’s through the satisfaction of accomplishing more complex work or just closing projects more quickly, your talent development strategy can help them achieve this.
• Professional fulfillment: Rare are the people in your workforce who can confidently say they’re not interested in any advancement. Talent development gives them a roadmap for building up the skills they need to grow into their role (and beyond it), meaning they don’t have to search for these resources elsewhere.
• Better morale and job satisfaction: Training and skill-building opportunities are a big part of job satisfaction for employees. Fewer than half of them feel like they have enough of these opportunities, according to the Pew Research Center. By deliberately building your talent development strategy, you’ll give people the opportunities they’re looking for, improving job satisfaction throughout your organization.

Benefits of a talent development strategy for your organization

Your employees will definitely benefit from a robust talent development strategy, but your organization will see serious advantages, too. Examples include:

• Employee retention: According to the Pew Research Center, 63% of employees who left a job in 2021 did so because they had no opportunities for advancement. While you can’t always offer advancement or promotion opportunities, a talent development strategy will help make employees feel like they’re always moving toward their next promotion.
• Better bang for your buck on hiring: Too many leaders look outward for most of their talent needs, meaning they’re going through every dollar in their hiring budget. But when 90% of new employees are ready to leave in the first month if things don’t go their way, those dollars often go to waste. A robust talent development strategy allows leaders to rely more heavily on existing employees (and their consistently growing skills) and make better decisions when looking for new hires.
• Stronger employee engagement: According to research from Gallup, only 29% of employees strongly agree that someone at their workplace encourages their development, and this absence can have a serious impact on employee engagement. With a proper talent development strategy, you’ll see improved engagement across the board.
• Internal leadership pipeline: Hiring for leadership roles is always a challenge. You have to find someone with the right skill set and bring them into a position where they need to start making serious decisions almost right away. When they don’t have the institutional knowledge the rest of your workforce does, it can take a serious amount of time for them to ramp up to a place where they can have a real impact. When you make talent development a priority, you can hire for more of these roles internally, meaning your new leader has years of knowledge an external hire could never match.

Now that you know the stakes, here’s how you can create your own talent development strategy.

Building your talent development strategy

At its core, talent development is about improving existing skills and learning new ones. But getting this exactly right involves a little more work than just asking employees what they want to learn and signing them up for a course.

Build a framework for deciding when to hire and when to build up internal talent

Your talent development strategy should build up internal talent to meet responsibilities and contribute to goals you’d otherwise need to hire for. That’s why you need to need a way to know when you should go through that effort and when you should hire. For example, you might decide to focus on the return on investment in certain types of training vs. the chance that a new hire stays with the team.

Match skill development goals to broader objectives

While you can offer educational opportunities across a wide range of topics, your talent development strategy will usually focus on training people in ways that mesh with your organization’s broader goals. For example, if you’re using a new type of project management technique to cut costs in important projects, you might want to offer training in these techniques to your employees, even if they’re not project managers themselves.

Find skill gaps

Sometimes, talent development is less about shooting for lofty goals than it is about plugging holes in a team’s existing skillset. As part of your talent development strategy, regularly evaluate each team’s skills to find growth opportunities. By doing this, you’re less likely to be blindsided when an important project or initiative depends on a skill that’s completely new to your organization.

Get stakeholders on your side

You won’t be able to build a robust strategy that encompasses the entire organization without getting buy-in from stakeholders like managers, leadership, and even individual collaborators. You’ll want to carefully plan how you pitch and roll out your strategy, taking feedback into account along the way. That’ll prevent any surprises and lead to a stronger strategy that’s a better fit for the organization at large.

Offer a range of training

When you start offering talent development opportunities to your workforce, it’s all too normal to begin with an excessively narrow focus. For example, you might spring for a specific learning tool that only offers courses on specific topics, leaving most of your organization without a solid way to train essential skills. You’ll want to offer a range of training options in various formats (e.g. digital courses, in-person sessions, guest speakers) for all sorts of skills. 

Set up employees with mentoring or coaching opportunities

You don’t have to carry the entire load of your talent development strategy. Network proactively and set up people in senior roles with junior collaborators in your organization looking to improve their skills. Sponsor these meetings—maybe by holding events at the office—to give employees access to resources they otherwise couldn’t find on their own. You get to develop internal talent without a significant investment of your own resources. It’s a win-win.

Adapt to different learning styles

One of the challenges of training up talent is that not everyone learns in the same way. Some employees want you to hand them a curriculum they can pursue on their own time while others prefer one-on-one coaching. And that’s not even mentioning how neurodiversity plays a role in talent development. By accommodating different learning styles, you can unlock more opportunities for growth throughout the organization and lower the risk of leaving important collaborators behind.

Use the right tools

There’s a host of e-learning tools out there built specifically for organizations looking to train up their workforce. But with the right performance management platform, you never need to get an extra tool; you can upskill your teams (and their managers) in the same platform you use for performance reviews and engagement surveys.

15Five is a performance management platform that turns data into real-time insights managers, HR pros, and other leaders can use to improve the way everyone works. It also has built-in learning resources that can help your entire workforce do more and do it better. You can learn more about these resources here.

Your organization’s got talent

You already know that acquiring and retaining top talent is key, but too few organizations have a defined talent development strategy in place. Often, the best talent is the talent you build up over time. By giving your workforce opportunities to build skills they’re passionate about while contributing to your organization’s broader goals, you create loyalty, improve employee engagement, and increase job satisfaction across all your teams. It takes an initial investment—and some trial and error—but you’ll be shocked by how much potential is hiding within your teams.