What Is Talent Development? Basics and Initiatives

Talent development is a very individualized process that helps you bring your workforce to the highest level. With a careful blend of goal-setting, coaching, assessment, training, and hiring, you can close skill gaps and turn your team into a high-performing powerhouse.

In this guide, we’ll go over the basics of establishing a talent development process, including:

• What is talent development?
• The importance of talent development
• 6 Ways talent development can impact your business
• 5 Ways talent development benefits team members
• Talent development strategies for your business
• Who should be involved in the talent development process?

What is talent development?

Talent development is just that—the process of developing your existing talent’s skill sets and capabilities. When you engage in talent development, you work with your existing team members to:

• Identify strengths. Each member of your team has different strengths and weaknesses. Finding out what these are early on can help you build the most effective talent development strategy for your team.
• Identify skills gaps. By identifying where everyone’s competencies lie and knowing your current and future needs, you can get a better understanding of what skills gaps you may have to close. A skills matrix, which is a grid that maps each team member’s proficiency in different skills, can help you start identifying gaps.‍
• Develop growth plans. Finding a skills gap can mean you need to bring in more talent, but that isn’t always the case. You can also work on developing growth plans for each team member. This may involve identifying learning opportunities through which team members can upskill—which allows them to do more and advance further within your company.‍
• Set SMART goals. SMART goals are specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and time-bound. By creating these goals for your team members, you can help guide them toward important milestones in a growth plan and create a sense of achievement and pride as they make progress.

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A talent development program can involve one-on-one meetings, group and individual training programs, team recognition events, and more.

The difference between talent development and talent management

A talent management strategy is the entire process of planning for, recruiting, hiring, and maintaining a workforce. It can include everything from writing job posts to finding new hires to optimizing how team members are onboarded.

Talent development, meanwhile, is just one part of a comprehensive talent management and workforce planning strategy. It is largely focused on individual team members’ learning, growth, and achievements. Your talent development efforts might include:

• Mentoring
• Job shadowing
• Team training
• Professional development classes
• Degree studies
• Goal-setting
• One-on-one meetings
• Strategic hiring

The importance of talent development

The 2022 Achievers Workforce Institute report revealed that only 59% of workers feel their current workplaces are giving them the support they need to achieve their goals.

When workers don’t feel supported, they’re more likely to look outside of your company for new opportunities—and leave.

The resulting impacts are felt on multiple levels. Suddenly, your HR team has new roles to fill, other team members have to pick up their former colleagues’ workload, and growth can slow.

By implementing a talent development strategy, you can help team members feel more supported, identify areas for promotion and retention, and keep work moving forward smoothly—without getting caught in a cycle of hiring and rehiring for the same roles.

For this to work, though, you’ll need to take a personalized approach to talent development.

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What are personalized talent development plans?

Personalized talent development plans look at:

• What skills a worker already has
• Support they may need in their current role
• Where they’d like to progress in their career
• Potential professional development opportunities
• Their professional interests
• Progress they make toward specific, measurable goals
• How the worker’s current and developing skills align with team and company needs

While the talent development plan process can look different for each company—and even each worker—you’ll typically approach it by focusing on:

1. Current skills, strengths, and support
2. Desired career path and interests
3. Goal-setting
4. Skills development
5. Advancement and succession

6 ways talent development can impact your business

The benefits of talent development are long-lasting and far-reaching. While we can’t cover every single possible benefit you may see—many will be unique to your business—you can expect to experience positive growth in each of these six areas.

1. Better team retention

Workers in the U.S., U.K., Canada, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands, and Singapore have all reported that career progression is the number one reason they’re likely to leave a job.

When you have a strong talent development plan in place, you can help your team members better identify:

• How they’d like their career to progress
• What a succession path looks like
• The professional milestones they can hit along the way
• The type of training they need to reach their next role

This type of one-on-one goal-setting, support, and engagement can help to keep high-performing team members at your company, not looking elsewhere for a promotion.

2. Greater productivity

When a team member is dissatisfied with the support or growth opportunities at your company and leaves, a heavy burden can fall on their colleagues. Someone has to handle that former worker’s responsibilities. Until the position is backfilled, the responsibility typically falls to other workers in a similar role.

Additionally, when a worker doesn’t feel they have the support they need in their job, they may find certain processes and tasks difficult or slow-going.

Both of these scenarios result in reduced productivity and longer lead times on completing work.

When you invest in proactive talent development, though, you can:

• Create well-planned succession and growth paths for team members
• Ensure everyone has the support they need to manage changing workloads during periods of transition
• Help team members get the skills and training they need to help them work faster and easier than ever before
• Identify when you need to bring in independent professionals to help ease the workload or provide experienced insight on certain tasks
• Boost team members’ engagement in and excitement about their work

Each of these positive benefits helps to boost productivity throughout the company.

3. Higher levels of team engagement

Talent development initiatives aren’t just about deciding what your team members’ paths forward look like and prescribing them a solution. They’re a combination of:

• Ongoing conversations
• Goal-setting
• Recognition

Together, these elements keep team members involved as active high-performance participants in their own development. And when team members are involved in the talent development process, it can help to boost their engagement in their work.

Rather than simply executing on a list of tasks assigned to them by a manager, workers are actively making progress on goals they’ve helped to set.

4. Better customer relationships

As your team continues to gain new skills, they can offer better products, solutions, and service to your customers. This isn’t just limited to your customer service teams, either.

Increased skills and output across the company can improve customer relationships through:

• The creation of better user experiences
• Faster delivery times on feature requests
• Increased personalization in customer communication

While meeting one-on-one with customer-facing team members, you can also tap into their knowledge and get their insight as to what customers need and want. By integrating these customer needs into talent development plans, you can improve both worker engagement and customer satisfaction at the same time.

5. Easier talent acquisition

When your team members are overworked or you need to backfill a role after an unexpected resignation, you may inadvertently rush through the recruiting process.

In these instances, hiring the first suitable person or someone who is professionally very similar to their predecessor can feel like the fast and easy route.

But what if that person really isn’t an example of the top talent for the role? What if your team would be better served by hiring a new colleague with different, yet complementary skill sets? Or what if you’d actually get more benefit out of bringing on a temporary consultant with specific expertise?

By having an active talent development strategy in place, you’ll:

• Better understand the specific skills you still need on your team
• Understand how to more accurately assess candidates’ skills to make sure they’ll be the right fit
• Have the flexibility to take your time and find the best talent for your team
• Build a talent pipeline that matches your current and expected future needs

Talent development will also help you identify when you can most effectively promote from within, rather than looking outside of your company for a new hire. Yes, you may still have to backfill that person’s role—but you’ll still have them on hand to help ease the training and transition process.

6. Smoother preparation for the future

When you’re regularly working with your team members on their career goals, achievements, and processes, you can begin to develop a succession plan. This is a multi-step approach that involves:

• Understanding how your current team members would like to grow and evolve their careers
• Mapping out the roles you expect you’ll need to fill, either internally or externally, in the next five years
• Implementing gradual training, shadowing, and mentorship to help prepare your existing team members for advancement within the company
• Clarifying exactly what skills you expect to need on your team in the future, so you can begin looking for entry-level hires with growth potential
• Ensuring you have the appropriate technology in place to carry operations forward

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5 Ways talent development benefits team members

Talent development also has a significant positive effect on your team members. In fact, the benefits that your company and its management realize are often directly linked to how team members benefit.

Once again, the benefits your individual team members experience will vary based on your company, their role, and their personality—but these five improvements tend to happen across the board.

1. Increased job satisfaction

Personalized education, training, and skills development can help your workers feel more satisfied in their roles. A 2022 survey by Gallup and Amazon Web Services indicated that 72% of workers who use advanced IT skills at work experienced high job satisfaction.

By comparison, only 43% of workers using basic digital skills reported the same level of satisfaction.

2. Improved self-actualization

The process of working through a talent development strategy can also help your team members feel a higher level of self-actualization.

Represented as one of the five levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, self-actualization is the realization of one’s potential, avenues for self development, and pursuit of elevated experiences.

Empowering your team members to clearly articulate their strengths, weaknesses, improvements, (HEand achievements at work can help them meet this intrinsic human need.

3. More challenging and rewarding assignments

You can further reinforce your team members’ increasing self-actualization and job satisfaction by giving them challenging yet rewarding work.

This can be a collaborative process, too. During your one-on-one meetings with workers, find out what kind of work engages and energizes them. Think about ways you can push them slightly beyond their comfort zone to grow and experience new things—all while providing the necessary support, of course.

Creating this kind of environment for growth can also empower team members to find and claim ownership of their own challenging and rewarding projects in the future.

4. Better job security

When your teams see their colleagues leaving one after another—even if those workers did so voluntarily—the situation can be demoralizing and spark worry about job security.

While talent development can’t mitigate all possible influences on job security, it can help teams to:

• Improve retention rates and reduce the appearance of churn
• Make sure that they’re only hiring for the roles and skill gaps that must be filled
• Strengthen bonds as they move through training exercises together
• Feel more confident in their work and the value they bring to the company

5. Improved pay and promotion potential

Offering your team members pay increases and promotion opportunities is an important complement to increased job security. It can:

• Further reinforce verbal recognition of a job well done
• Improve overall quality of life
• Enable team members and their families to have a better work-life balance
• Serve as an important rung on a career ladder

Talent development strategies for your business

Finding the right talent development strategies for your business is a win-win for everyone—from leaders right through to the newest team member.

Depending on where your company stands right now, you may need to engage in one or more of the below strategies in order to bring your talented teams up to their full potential.

Engage in leadership development and team coaching

Talent development should take place at all levels, including among team leaders and managers. These are the same people that may be guiding the talent development process for more junior workers, so it’s important to make sure that they, too:

• Feel supported in their work
• Understand what growth and promotion paths are open to them
• Have access to resources that develop their growth as leaders
• Are setting their own SMART goals

When you’re implementing a company-wide talent development strategy for the first time, it may be helpful to:

• Bring in a consultant who can help coach your leadership team
• Get buy-in from your entire management team
• Give leaders resources for coaching and guiding their teams in turn

Create mentorship programs

Adding a mentorship program is a great way to establish a culture of talent development from the very first day someone onboards at your company. By pairing new hires with more experienced team members, you can:

• Demonstrate company culture in action
• Begin to guide new team members through the goal-setting and talent development process
• Create a more informal, conversational space for new hires to talk about their concerns and questions (vs. managerial one-on-one meetings that may feel like a performance management review)
• Get insights from the mentor as to how the new hire is developing in their role

Mentorship benefits go both ways, too. While more senior team members can impart wisdom about your industry and company, new colleagues can show your teams how to use new tools or approach problems differently.

And if one of your mentor/mentee pairs happens to collaborate and communicate in ways that would be beneficial to the whole team, you can turn it into a group professional development session.

Establish professional development programs

Professional development programs can be held at the individual or group level, and may be led by an internal team member or external consultant.

Such programs may include these and other actions:

• Training a group to use a new software platform
• Coaching individuals to improve leadership skills
• Attending seminars on new industry developments
• Sending a group of team members to a conference
• Explaining one department’s tasks and processes to another

Provide certification training courses

Some jobs (such as those in restaurants, hospitals, schools, warehouses, and accounting firms) may require specific certifications. By offering relevant training courses to team members, you can show you’re committed to their development and advancement within your company.

You may opt to send team members to courses for:

• Certification renewal
• Obtaining a new certification for their role
• Preemptively getting a certification to help them in a future role

Depending on the size of your team, you may opt to have team members leave work for a day or two to take a certification course off-site. You may also be able to bring a trainer in to certify the whole company.

Offer tuition support

If you’ve identified that a team member is interested in a particular career path, but needs some more training to get there, you may want to offer them tuition support.

While this arrangement can take many forms, it typically involves a company paying for or reimbursing a worker for the cost of university tuition. This agreement may be for one course or an entire degree, and the worker may be required to stay on at the company for a period of time.

A tuition support agreement is a way for workers to show that they’re very committed to learning and growing—and for companies to show they support their teams in doing so. This in itself can improve team satisfaction and retention rates.

Build a growth-focused company culture

Finally, you’ll want to make sure that every action you take contributes toward building a growth-focused company culture.

By fully embracing continual learning, you can cultivate an environment where:

• Team members know it’s OK to ask questions and to learn—and that they won’t suffer repercussions from making a mistake
• Hard work and progress toward measurable goals is recognized and rewarded
• Everyone feels supported and is making contributions toward a singular goal (in addition to their own personal goals!)

But the process of evolving and learning doesn’t stop at the worker level. Companies and their leaders also need to be continually evaluating, improving, and welcoming feedback on the talent development process. By doing so, you can be sure you’re continuing to build a system that works well for your teams and enables everyone to reap all the benefits of talent development.

Who should be involved in the talent development process?

While talent development plans may exist on an individual level, it’s essential that everyone involved be an active participant in making this strategy work for the whole company. This means all of your leaders, HR professionals, and team members should be committed to their roles in talent development.

Sometimes, though, you may find you need a little extra help to get a talent development process started—or to evolve your existing approach into something better. This is where a talent development professional comes in.

What does a talent development professional do?

A talent development professional may go by a variety of titles, including talent development consultant or talent development manager.

Regardless of what they’re called, these professionals typically have one or more specialities, which can include:

• Team training
• Instructional design
• Business coaching
• Management consulting
• Human resources management

They’ll be able to work with your company leaders and HR teams to:

• Come up with a way to identify skill gaps
• Plan attainable learning paths for your workers
• Coordinate the rollout of talent development principles across the company
• Implement processes and policies that support team member growth
• Streamline the hiring process to fill remaining skill gaps

Get help creating a comprehensive talent development strategy

You can get the help you need to build a talent development strategy (or fill skill gaps you’ve already identified!) here on Upwork. Whether you’re looking for a talent management professional, a training and development consultant, or a human resources manager, you can find them by posting a job in Talent Marketplace™.

If you’re a talent development or HR consultant yourself, you can also use Upwork to connect with great clients in need of your services. Simply log into your Upwork account and begin browsing organizational development jobs and training jobs today.