Welcome to the Talent Development blog. In this blog, we’ll feature forward-thinking ideas on talent development from other SumTotal staff members and industry gurus. Our goal? To generate valuable discussion, answer questions, and raise your curiosity. Talent development, after all, is a burgeoning new field. It seemingly resides under the umbrella of human resources—but at heart, there’s a lot more involved.

There’s also a lot of confusion. Take, for example, the basic Wikipedia entry for talent development, which inaccurately equates the term with “human resource development” and half-heartedly defines it as “an organization’s ability to align strategic training and career opportunities for employees.” Is that all it is? Of course not. The entry also cites a reference who claims talent development only centers on a company’s top 10 percent of employees. Is this true? Not really.

So what is talent development? As a company, SumTotal offers this definition: the strengthening of employee productivity through automated and integrated learning, performance, and compensation solutions to drive business results on a daily basis.

But what does that mean when applied to your business? Is it strictly about HR acting for the benefit of your workers? And is talent development the same as talent management?

Not quite. Unlike talent management—which often approaches the tasks related to recruiting and managing employees from the perspective of meeting HR objectives—effective talent development is about alignment of your existing workforce with business goals. It’s about finding and opening the right doors for your workforce, so they are engaged and ready to reach their full potential. It’s about creating and nurturing a high-performance culture, where employees are developed for leadership, success is rewarded, and key people are easy to retain. And it’s about reducing the risk you face in terms of regulatory or continuing education compliance, so you can eliminate inefficiencies and unnecessary fines. Ultimately, it is one of the foundational items of any executive’s agenda.

In other words, talent development is a much broader, and more holistic, set of initiatives. It spans learning, performance, and compensation management—but more importantly, it unites these elements in virtuous synergy, where your business supports and develops your workforce, just as your workforce supports and develops your business.

The bottom line: Your entire company is involved in talent development, and your whole business reaps the advantages in tangible, concrete ways.

We’ve barely scraped the surface of what talent development entails and what the right
talent development solutions can accomplish—but in the weeks ahead, we’ll delve deeper into various segments. With your help, we look forward to growing this blog into a trusted, viable source for accurate information on the topics that matter most to you.