Edutech Worldwide 
Making talent management a strategic priority
Paradoxically, in spite of the current slowdown, critical talent is becoming scarce. To stay competitive during these times and in the future, savvy organizations are becoming proactive in keeping the right talent.
Forward-thinking organizations are adopting various strategies to build their workforce. These strategies include:
Cultivating existing talent: By cultivating existing talent rather than going on a hiring spree, companies keep skilled employees longer and decrease training costs.
Improving employee satisfaction: By supporting employees in their personal career plans, and by providing learning opportunities, companies reduce attrition.
Planning ahead for succession: Successful companies prepare succession plans for
top spots, and keep transitions short.
Acting on performance reviews: Instead of filing away performance reviews each year, companies gap-analyze performance data against position requirements, career and succession plans, and learning and development plans are assigned based on gaps. Performance reviews thus become actionable.
To enable these strategies, companies are adopting enterprise Talent Management solutions to make the process easier to implement, measure, and integrate.
A Talent management solution helps organizations with their talent initiatives. Talent Management integrates the needs of executives, management, and employees into one system, and unifies the information across applications such as Performance Management, Learning Management, Career Development, and Succession Planning.
Companies looking for a Talent Management solution need to look carefully and honestly at their own business processes, and visualize how the solution will support the ways in which they actually operate, and the goals they seek to meet. They need to ask such questions as:
- Will the Talent Management solution improve their performance management and development process?
- Can it tie the performance review process to training and development requirements?
- Does the solution help employees grow professionally, and achieve their career goals?
To meet these and many other needs, a Talent Management solution must work as a unified, holistic solution, not as a collection of separate modules. Many of the new talent strategies that are becoming critical-specifically surrounding performance, succession, and learning - involve multiple Talent Management components.
Edutech offers a consolidated solution that has been built from the ground up to work as a unified whole.
As a result, the Talent Management suite affords these benefits:
- Improved workforce productivity, because business processes seamlessly span the Talent Management suite-turning performance, career, and succession plans into active strategies.
- Higher user adoption at all levels of the organization, through a consistent user interface.
- Single view of Talent Management data through a unified data model.
In summary, the promise of Talent Management solutions is that by providing information to all employees and their managers (not just to HR), and doing so continually (not just at performance review time), employers and employees truly work together to build better organizations. Employers better communicate their objectives and expectations, and employees plan and develop lasting careers around those objectives. As a result, talent stays in house, morale and productivity go up, and the organization grows a talent base that effectively buffers it against the effects of a talent crisis.
