Emotional Intelligence & Decision Making

Emotional intelligence and the ability to make good decisions are paramount to professional success. Emotional intelligence is the ability to understand, assess, and regulate your own emotions, correctly interpret the verbal and nonverbal behaviors of others, and adjust your behavior in relation to others. Emotional intelligence is a key strength in building rapport. Decision making requires one to determine the need and importance of making a decision, identify choices, gather information about choices, and take action on the appropriate choice.

Technology Application

Disruption via technology will continue to be a reality for organizations and talent development functions. Talent development professionals must have the ability to identify, select, and implement the right learning and talent technologies that serve the best interests of the organization and its people. Practitioners should be able to identify opportunities to adapt and leverage the right technologies at the right time to meet organizational goals.

Project Management

Analyzing and prioritizing elements of a learning initiative or talent solution helps to ensure a meaningful and relevant learner experience. Effective project management requires being able to plan, organize, direct, and control resources for a finite period to complete specific goals and objectives.

Training Delivery & Facilitation

Training delivery and facilitation are means by which talent development professionals help individuals improve performance at work by learning new skills and knowledge. The practitioner serves as a catalyst for learning by understanding the learner’s needs, creating the right environment for learning, building rapport with participants, and using the appropriate delivery options and media to make learning engaging, effective, relevant, and applicable.

Business Insights

To add the most value to an organization, Talent development professionals should understand business principles and the specific business or organization in which they work. Business insight is the understanding of key factors affecting a business, such as its current situation, influences from its industry or market, and factors influencing growth. It also includes understanding how an organization accomplishes its mission or purpose, makes and spends money, and makes decisions, as well as the internal processes and structures of how work gets done. Having business insight is essential to strategic involvement with top management and ensuring talent development strategies align with overall business strategy.

Data & Analytics

Data and analytics are key drivers for organization performance and should be drivers for talent development. This is about the ability to collect, analyze, and use large data sets in real time to affect learning, performance, and business. Discerning meaningful insights from data and analytics about talent, including performance, retention, engagement, and learning, enables the talent development function to be leveraged as a strategic partner in achieving organizational goals.

Career & Leadership Development

Creating a culture of career development in an organization can be a competitive advantage. Being effective at career and leadership development requires the ability to create planned processes of interaction between the organization and the individual that allows an employee to grow within the organization. Understanding the specific skills and capabilities an organization needs now and in the future is important when developing assessments, programs, and pathways to advance employees within the organization.

Talent Strategy & Management

For an organization to realize its potential, talent development should be integrated into all components of talent strategy and management. Talent strategy and management are the practices used to build an organization’s culture, engagement, capability, and capacity through the implementation and integration of talent acquisition, employee development, retention, and deployment processes, ensuring these processes are aligned to organizational goals. Depending on organizational context and structure, broad partnerships with HR and line leaders will be needed.

Diversity, Cultural Awareness & Inclusion

Cultural awareness and the ability to foster an inclusive work environment are requirements in today’s global business climate. Being effective at both means conveying respect for different perspectives, backgrounds, customs, abilities, and behavior norms, as well as ensuring all employees are respected and involved by leveraging their capabilities, insights, and ideas.

Coaching & Mentoring

Coaching is a discipline and practice that is an essential capability for any talent development professional and it has the power to catalyze breakthroughs to enhance individual, team, and organizational performance. Coaching is an interactive process that helps individuals develop more rapidly toward a preferred future state, produce results, set goals, take action, make better decisions, and capitalize on their natural strengths. Coaching requires using global listening, asking powerful questions, strengthening conversations, and creating action plans.