Talent Development Forum Summary

As the great resignation continues to march on, many organizations are finding that as talent leaves, so does all the business process, system, product, and best practices expertise.  Our Talent Forum on October 28, 2022, discussed the challenges we are facing from an L&D perspective. We had a record number attending the event this year!  Thank you to all our volunteers who helped make this event such a success, especially Rochelle Behling for producing the event and Kohl’s for hosting.

Here are some highlights…..

Michelle Reid-Powell from the CARA group led off the discussion with some insights into how to keep L&D relevant and impactful in a changing world. Based on their research and expertise, CARA recommends the following solutions to combat these challenges:

1. Learning and Development teams should join forces with those associated with Workforce Planning and Talent Acquisition.  Together, these teams can align approaches and metrics and partner to optimize talent initiatives.
2. Review your learnings and ensure you place value over volume.  Be careful to simplify your offerings and focus on a few great learnings versus 100s.
3. Support and develop your managers. With all that is happening in the world, managers need to build their skill sets around creating emotional safety, career and skills development, coaching, managing a remote workforce, and how to support diversity, equity and inclusion more fully. Managers need a playbook to help them support learning paths.
4. Learning strategies need to ensure connections for all participants before, during and after the learning.
5. Metrics are important and more feedback from the sessions are even more important.  Focus groups, surveys and performance check-ins are important for all learning sessions.

After Michelle set the stage, we turned to our panel for their insights.  We were fortunate to have four key leaders from SE-WI to share their experience:

• Yolonda Evans, Org and Change Effectiveness Consultant at American Family Insurance
• Guillermo Gutierrez, Director of Diversity, Inclusion and Equity at ManpowerGroup
• Allison Peschel, VP of Client Services at J&B Training Solutions
• Mike Tack, Director of Talent Development at Kohl’s

Some highlights of the discussion:

How is the world of work changing?

As there is so much volatility in the business, we need to prioritize HOW to equip people managers to lead change and create a safe work environment where people are able to share their ideas and viewpoints. Mike Tack emphasized the importance of walking in the managers’ shoes. He stressed the need to know the daily challenges managers face in performing their jobs and aligning that with learning solutions.

“Never more critical time for hard skills – what I mean by that are people skills. Those are most important now,” stated Guillermo Gutierrez.

 L&D is being embraced right now because managers are exhausted.  We (L&D practitioners) have to prioritize what our leaders truly need right now.  Yolanda Evans chimed in, “Now they need us – for a long time we were the scapegoat.  For the first time you are a first responder – double edged sword!” Yolonda exclaimed.

An interesting observation shared by Allison included, “we are also finding that what is challenging now are the informal conversations that were happening before the pandemic are now more formal conversations in the remote world.”

Looking for more tips or solutions?  A detailed white paper will be coming in December.