With many organisations taken by surprise by the speed of the economic upturn, businesses are scrabbling to fill a talent pipeline they’ve largely neglected through the recession. Currently, almost every industry sector is struggling to meet demand due to staff and skills shortages, stunting growth, reducing quality, and putting undue pressure on existing staff.
Companies are facing talent shortages, skills mismatches and weak leadership pipelines that threaten business growth, and all because of the lack of agility inherent in the traditional approach to talent management, development and training. Budgets are cut when times are hard – just when businesses should be preparing for the upturn – leaving a gaping hole where talented, self aware, highly motivated employees should be developing their skills base.
Empowering, encouraging and expecting great employees to take responsibility for their own career and skills development, and valuing these individuals more highly in recognition of this, turns the dynamic upside down and solves the problem.
Businesses and people can create a virtuous circle in which the very best talent is recognised, rewarded and supported, and, in turn, that talent takes responsibility for self development, and self direction.
Individuals should be recognised for investing time and money in their own career development, and businesses should provide an environment that supports, recognises and values existing talent as an ongoing commitment to their very best people.
With the onus on career development moved from employer to employee, the issue of agility and response times evaporates. Individuals are able to spot and exploit sector trends rather faster than their employers, and employees who “skill up”, especially when particular skills are in short supply, are highly valued.
Creating an environment in which people direct their own careers, thereby leading fulfilled and rewarding working lives, and businesses benefit from an agile, motivated and focused workforce, thereby creating a competitive edge for themselves, is what Career Voyage is all about.
Sarah Taylor Phillips is a Future of Work strategist, speaker and founder of Career Voyage. With a background spanning AI, fmcg marketing, headhunting, interim management and entrepreneurship, she has spent more than 30 years’ connecting people, strengths and opportunities.
Today, Sarah works with organisations to attract, engage, retain, retrain and exit talent across age-diverse and intergenerational workforces from early and returning talent to experienced workers. Her work focuses on better work design, job sharing, flexible and fractional careers, knowledge transfer, rethinking retirement and reengineering role for an AI- enabled world.
At the heartof Career VoyAGE is a simple question:
How can we design work differently to make better use of the talent we already have?