Thriving in flux: Leveraging talent sharing for sustainable growth
Discover the fundamental components of a learning organization, including continuous learning, knowledge sharing, and collaboration, and explore their relevance in the context of talent sharing.
Understand how to mitigate against the predicted talent shortage of 85 million people by 2030, by learning how to facilitate internal moves, learning, and support.
Explore the evolving role of managers as connectors and facilitators of internal mobility, and learn how they can promote cross-functional collaboration and mentorship within their teams and how you can implement a culture of talent sharing.
In this UNLEASH webinar watch Rebecca Donnelly, Senior Partner and Head of Development at Tyto PR speak with Katie Obi, Chief People Officer at Beamery, and Erin Spencer, Senior Research Analyst at Deloitte as they uncover the growth benefits to be gained from boosting internal mobility and learning.
Webinar highlights
Skills difficult to get – “The half-life of skills is now around 4 years and the half-life of tech skills is even shorter at 2.5 years” – Rebecca Donnelly, Senior Partner and Head of Development at Tyto PR.
This, explained Donnelly, means the job of HR and TA is even more difficult. It’s hard to predict needed skills, and hard to workforce plan, and with the 85 million person global talent dearth by 2030, organizations can’t go on hiring as they have.
“It’s important that organizations change approaches and adapt to the market and grow talent internally and reskill people to meet [talent demands] as old ways of filling talent gaps will just not work in future” Katie Obi, Chief People Officer at Beamery.
Obi added that internal mobility is crucial as the skills gap in the UK is costing £63 billion a year whilst in the US it is costing $162 billion.
Talent hoarding ‘never pays’ – The biggest barrier to preventing internal talent mobility is talent hoarding, usually from line managers. However, policies that prohibit employees from moving around can also be an issue, usually driven by fear of losing skilled individuals to different teams and different projects and not being able to deliver for other customers.
“However, talent hoarding will never pay as someone will look for a different opportunity and look elsewhere,” Katie Obi, Chief People Officer at Beamery.
Worryingly, employees say that finding a job in their own organization can be more difficult than outside which means HR has to ask itself if the organization is genuinely supporting talent mobility.
The benefits of internal mobility
As discussed in the webinar, the benefits of talent mobility are clear: it brings different perspectives together, can foster product breakthroughs, drive customer success, and promote diversity of thought. It can also boost career progression, talent retention, and satisfaction rates.
As Katie Obi, Chief People Officer at Beamery said, it can also benefit the organization by trialing moves internally. “The organization can try before they buy and find skills we might not even know employees have…and it’s a safe opportunity for people to nurture skills.”
It can also allow employees to try a potential move, see if it works for them, and practice utilizing skills that are otherwise not benefiting the business. Indeed, Beamery stats shared on the webinar show that only 35% of employees believe their skills are utilized with eight percent of people saying none of their skills are utilized at all.
How to make internal mobility work
Managers are crucial to the success of internal mobility, the webinar discussion laid out. They have to be celebrated for letting employees move on, with leaders framing this as good for the organization and creating a psychologically safe environment for managers to be able to do this. Managers should be rewarded and recognized for growing their staff.
Leadership buy-in is also crucial and HR should show executives success from pilots and relevant stats. Celebrating the potential of new roles and how learning can open up different career pathways is also considered crucial. Here, improved learning opportunities, better organizational skills profiling, and the use of technology (such as AI) are vital to understanding the skills environment at an organization. There can also be a move away from the traditional understanding of roles towards skills.
“This creates an environment around learning and being able to celebrate a way of showing new opportunities to get skills” Katie Obi, Chief People Officer at Beamery.