Joost Heins headshot for sponsored blog post

Joost Heins

Just a couple years ago, companies were conducting hiring sprees, scooping up a seemingly unlimited supply of talent. Today, however, more talent professionals are asked to do more with less, while facing intense competition for individuals with the most business-critical skills. But this reset has given rise to a new way of thinking about talent—the skills-based transformation, in which candidates are hired, and internal talent developed, based on their unique skills and strengths.To make the skills-based transition successful, companies must ensure their talent acquisition (TA) and learning and development (L&D) teams work more closely together. This will be especially important since talent with key skills is harder to find than ever. According to Randstad Enterprise’s latest in-demand skills research, global hiring complexity for AI and automation skills is two times higher than average, while data analytics skills are 2.3 times higher.In this landscape, rather than always turning to recruiting external talent, consider how individuals with key skills—or at least the potential to learn them—may already be in the organization. But without insights and development plans from L&D, those high-potential employees, and their skill sets, may remain hidden. Along the same lines, when new talent is brought in, L&D should be involved as well, helping to ensure they continually learn and grow to develop the skills needed for the future.But for TA and L&D to collaborate most effectively, they must leverage the right data to help guide their decisions. With access to up-to-date talent intelligence—about the supply of skills both within your organization and outside it—TA and L&D teams gain the insights to better work together and ultimately ensure the company acquires the right skills.Identify the skills you need.Due to the growing use of AI, the skills companies need are changing constantly. With access to the right talent intelligence, companies can better predict the skills that will be most critical for their organizations today and into the future. And if talent with those skills is too difficult to find internally or externally, the data can help identify talent with the adjacent or transferable skills most indicative of success in attaining those needed skills. Once those skills are identified, TA and L&D can work together to determine the best way to acquire those skills, whether hiring externally or developing internal—or even external—talent.Build a skilled and diverse workforce.As part of the skills-based transformation, many organizations leverage talent intelligence to conduct skills mapping or create skills ontologies to better understand the skills already in the organization. Such insights can also reveal the individuals who show strong potential to learn the new skills that TA may be struggling to find externally. This approach is also helpful for enhancing workforce diversity and creating equity. With female talent largely under-represented in some of the most in-demand skills, like AI and automation, providing promising female employees with the right training and development can improve diversity while ensuring the company gains those needed skills.Understand the external talent market.Strong talent intelligence can help you find the best sources for the skills your organization needs. It can also uncover essential data about what those individuals are looking for in their next role, like salary expectations and desire to work remotely, so TA can be better positioned to attract and engage them. If talent with the exact skills can’t be found, TA can still hire based on the potential and inherent skills of the top candidates, working with L&D to create the development paths to fill those crucial gaps.Make smarter decisions with talent intelligence.While finding talent with the most in-demand skills may be challenging, companies that drive collaboration between their TA and L&D teams will be better positioned to identify the right people, or nurture promising talent to help them learn those skills. When guided by robust talent intelligence, the result is a streamlined approach to acquiring the skills needed immediately, while providing the training that keeps up with the skills needed for the future.Download Randstad’s latest in-demand skills research. See the supply and demand of the skills you need with the in-demand skills dashboard.

Why Talent Acquisition and L&D Must Work Together to Find Talent With Key Skills

June 2013 - TD Magazine

Working with ON24, Sodexo created a virtual learning environment to provide training and boost engagement.

Business Outcomes Improved With Virtual Learning

 The reality is that training “events” don’t work. As learning professionals, it’s time we stopped delivering training events and started delivering performance improvement processes that have learning as a key component. As Linda Hudson, CEO of BAE Systems US Army, said in an interview in The Wall Street Journal, “You don’t go to a class and next week, everything changes.”Companies invest in training and development to enhance capability and improve performance. However to improve performance, employees have to do things differently and better when they return to work. If they don’t change their behaviors back on the job, then performance won’t change, no matter how much they learned. As Einstein supposedly quipped: “One definition of insanity is to continue doing the same thing and expect a different result.”People don’t change their behavior just because they learned something new. As we explained in our Infoline,  “Ensuring Learning Transfer,” people need to apply what they learned once they return to work if training is to produce business value. Whether or not they do so depends on how they answer two questions: “Can I?” and “Will I?” Unless they answer “yes” to both, they will slide back into old habits and the training will go to waste. Getting value from training requires both great learning and great learning transfer. That is why we have to think beyond events.The answer to the “Can I?” question is strongly influenced by the training itself. To say, “Yes, I can,” employees need to feel confident that they can competently perform the skills they were taught. The instructional design needs to include the right amount of content, and especially, adequate practice with feedback. However, the post-training environment also affects trainees’ belief that they can; their manager has to give them the opportunity, and they need job aids and other forms of performance support to boost their confidence.Even if employees can perform in a new and better way, they need to be motivated to make the effort; they have to also say, “Yes, I will.” Many factors affect participants’ willingness to apply what they have learned; almost all of these factors occur in the post-training “transfer climate.” Support from the participant’s manager is key.Indeed, a study at American Express concluded that “an immediate leader has the potential to either make or break any training effort.” Thus, learning professionals who ignore the post-training environment and see their jobs as simply putting on events are putting their jobs at risk. Getting a return on an investment in training is a process that needs to be managed as such and continuously improved—or as we like to say, “The real work begins when the training ends.”If you want your training efforts to earn greater respect and produce even greater impact, think “process” not “event.” Plan for and influence the whole process by which training becomes performance.If you want your training efforts to be rewarded with even greater impact, start with why. To learn more, join us at one of the upcoming ASTD Learning Transfer Certificate programs. The next program is online starting on September 22, 2014.

Joost Heins

About