Talent Development and the Employee Experience

Top Employers have always been good at talent development. In recent disruptive times, the positive step of employee development as a top priority for organisations has been vital to keeping the best talent on board. And this is why we have captured what Best Practice looks like for talent development, in the second e-book in a three-part series, called Optimising the Employee Journey.

We can share these insights because of our Top Employers Certification Programme. This programme begins with our HR Best Practices survey of an organisation’s people practices across the employee lifecycle. For example, our first e-book looked at what Top Employers are doing to improve their Employer Branding, Talent Acquisition and On-boarding efforts, part of what we call the “Attract” domain. And this second e-book focuses on Top Employer people practices for improving Performance, Career and Learning, part of our “Develop” domain. These are three of the essential elements of employee development, and the way in which these are fostered is integral to an organisation’s culture.

A Digital Future

Technology of course is a key enabler of every employee’s development. This has only accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic, with organisations looking for digital solutions to develop the knowledge of their people, break open silos of expertise, and accelerate learning and development. For example, around 75% of Top Employers now have online platforms in place to enable peer-to-peer knowledge sharing.

Capgemini provides an excellent example of the impact of talent development on the employee experience. A global leader in consulting, digital transformation, technology, and engineering services, this organisation has been well placed to develop a peer-to-peer knowledge sharing platform. As Covid-19 unfolded, Capgemini’s platform, Give and Receive to Improve (GARI), played a key role in accelerating the organisation of online training, workshops, information sessions, and collaborative learning. GARI also helped the business to identify employees who could answer technical or job-specific questions. This proved to be invaluable to employees working from home looking for practical help around their roles.

GARI content was user-generated, with no moderation from HR needed. There were no constraints on who, when or how knowledge-sharing occurs. It is also open to all: communities are created around points of interest, with every employee able to sign up to the communities of their choice. 1,450 learning sessions were held in 2020, equating to 72,000 hours of content. And this success has led the company to set an ambitious target of 100,000+ GARI users company-wide for 2021, from 71,000 employees in 2020.

Each of our e-books covers similar moments in the employee journey for our Top Employers. They showcase a selection of the most innovative and engaging people practices being implemented by organisations globally. And this second e-book will help every organisation to understand HR Best Practice in employee development.

You can download our first e-book to discover what Top Employers are doing to improve their Employer Branding, Talent Acquisition and On-boarding efforts. These topics fall under the “Attract” domain in our HR Best Practices Survey. Our second e-book focuses on Top Employer people practices for improving Performance, Career and Learning under the “Develop” domain. The third and final e-book looks at the “Engage” domain, with a specific focus on Well-being, Engagement, Rewards & Recognition and Off-boarding.