In order to generate the most value for your business you have to invest in your talent. This will give you significant competitive advantage.
Investing in your talent, not only upgrades their skill sets and aids them meet their potential but by investing in them and showing your commitment to them, it will result in them being committed to you. Often businesses fear that they will spend fortunes on developing their talent for them to only use the new skills to go and use them working elsewhere. That in the most part simply isn’t the case. By providing opportunities to develop, not only will the individual develop, the business will too, and the talent will grow along with your ambitions.
One of Perfficiency’s clients is one the best known Logistics Businesses within the UK. They have for the past three decades had the view that development and promotion from within guarantees success. The view is that from developing the staff continually they will grow as the business grows. The continued investment along with the growth opportunities the business has, it results in growth opportunities and promotions for the most talented staff.
Their approach includes a variety of measures to improve and develop their talent. Many of which can be adopted by any business. They have simple practices in place such as bi-annual appraisals, identifying key skill development, the setting of annual development goals and understanding the individuals short, medium and long term career goals. The business is then able to match those competencies and ambitions to new opportunities within the business. From these reviews the business can then offer competency improvement either from internal training courses on systems, Word / Excel skills to offering support in terms of time and money to industry recognised qualifications such as CIMA, ACCA, CIPS and CPC’s.
These approaches allow training to be tailored to the business which can have an instant positive affect on the business. The cost of employment is also reduced as they don’t have to spend as much on recruitment in order to get new skills and qualifications into the business.
They develop the staff they have who are moulded with the goals and beliefs of the company to go and secure the qualifications they need therefore having individuals with much broader abilities and knowledge than if they were to recruit externally. It must also be noted that they also have one of the highest levels of staff retention in the industry thus amplifying the benefit of developing your talent.
The value that talent development can bring massive and fundamental to achieving competitive advantage. Your staff can be developed to having all of the necessary skills to lead their category but will also have all of the knowledge, cultural understanding and experience of working in your business. When comparing this to your rivals who may just recruit new staff with particular skill sets, the value of the previous business understanding will be priceless to you.
