Six essential steps to creating a talent roadmap that will help your business—and your people—grow.
Creating a Talent Roadmap to Help Your People and Company Grow
It’s no secret that talent development is essential for your company to grow. It fills your pipeline with future leaders who are ready to step up when needed. It equips your team with the skills and capabilities to meet business objectives and adapt to new challenges. It also helps you find and keep the best people.
In Workforce 2024, Korn Ferry’s Global Insights Report, 27% of respondents chose excellent learning and developmentopportunities as one of the top five reasons to move to a new job, and 25% said it would be enough to make them stay in their current job.
But throwing money at leadership development and succession planning without a strategy in place is like playing the lottery. You might luck out and strike it rich, but chances are much higher that you’ll have wasted a dollar.
To successfully develop your workforce to meet business objectives, you need a talent development strategy. Here is the roadmap to create one.
Step 1: Start with Your Business Objectives
“Understanding the business goals and how the people strategy embeds into that will inform the talent strategy,” says Jerry Collier of Korn Ferry. “We always start with the business strategy first.”
For example, a fast-moving consumer goods company embarking on a premiumization journey will require a vastly different people strategy than if the same organization wanted to undergo a company-wide digital transformation.
To ensure business alignment when developing your roadmap, you should:
- Identify your organization’s business goals
- Determine how your people strategy feeds into these goals
- Anchor your talent development strategy in the outcomes of the business
Step 2: Identify Critical Roles to Achieve the Objectives
The next step is to identify who will help drive the company toward its goals.
“Talent can mean different things to different businesses, so you have to identify what you mean by talent within your organization,” says Collier.
Determine whether you’ll focus on a small group with specific capabilities or adopt a “talent is everywhere” approach to develop the entire workforce.
Often companies will decide that the “vital many”—all individual roles across the organization—are crucial. And in many cases, this can be the right call. However, he warns not to overlook key roles within the business that are essential to achieving your goals, such as significant value creator roles and critical leadership roles.
Decide where you will put your resources, based on your business goals.
Step 3: Assess Which Skills You Have and Where the Skills Gaps Are
Once you know which types of people and roles will help you achieve your objectives, the next step is to determine whether you already have this talent within the organization.
Through skill assessments, identify what skills fluency, technical abilities, experiences, and leadership characteristics are required to deliver that performance. Then identify those who match or are a close match to these target profiles.
You need to ask yourself, where are we starting from? “You must have some form of discovery to baseline the talent you have in the organization,” says Collier. “This will allow you to prioritize your development action.”
Step 4: Decide on the Skill Development and Training Programs
Now that you know where you’re starting from, you can decide what route you want to take. What leaders are you going to grow through upskilling or reskilling? Where are the gaps that you’ll need to fill by buying in talent?
“Scale your ambition to the energy and the assets that you have,” says Collier. “You’ve got finite resources, finite energy, finite dollars. Do you spread it across everyone and every area? Or do you target it in certain areas to move the dial? Be deliberate.”
To develop leadership competencies in top-of-house, domain-specific value creators and high-potentials, you’ll need personalized, managed solutions such as one-to-one leadership coaching.
For training on a larger scale, you’ll need solutions that employees can manage themselves, like self-paced online courses. Powered by AI learning and development, mass-delivered development programs like these can offer continuous learning and be customized by delivery method and content to suit each individual’s job and learning style.
Step 5: Make Communications Part of the Plan
When creating your talent roadmap, be sure to include a plan for communication as well—both with your people and with the C-suite. Without well-considered internal comms, you may not achieve the impact you’d hoped for.
Communication is crucial not only for change management but also for making your employees feel valued.
“You need to convey that their development matters to you and that you believe in the benefits of this growth path for them,” says Collier. “Your teams will also want to know that they’ll be supported.”
He points out that many companies mistakenly focus only on processes, like sharing links to online learning courses. What’s arguably more important is showing that you’re committed to your future leaders and want them to benefit fully from their learning. “That will impact engagement, but also retention,” he says.
Likewise, communication is key to getting leadership buy-in. “At some point, someone’s going to say, ‘We spent $10 million on our talent development last year. Should we be spending $5 or $20 million next year?’” says Collier. It’s critical that you’re able to link your talent development program to business objectives and clearly convey its value.
Step 6: Measure and Gather Feedback
Finally, be sure that you close the loop by assessing the results and reviewing feedback.
“Is your talent development action working, and how might you improve it?” asks Collier. “Are you seeing the business results you were hoping for? Are your people responding favorably to the learning and development?”
Use both qualitative and quantitative feedback, leveraging AI and digital technology to scale where needed.
For example, if premiumization is your objective, look at key performance indicators such as brand equity scores and market share to confirm that your people are driving the desired change. If your goal is to improve retention, look at employee engagement surveys and turnover rates.
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