Capabilities for Talent Development

Shaping the Future of the Profession

Pat Galagan, Morgean Hirt, Courtney Vital

• Publisher: Association for Talent Development
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781950496518
• Topic: Persönliche Entwicklung
• Subtopic: Karriere

What Talent Development Professionals Should Know and Do to Be SuccessfulThe talent development field is deep and wide, encompassing the efforts that foster learning and employee development to drive organizational performance, productivity, and results. Major societal forces and business changes require talent development professionals across all industries to adopt new approaches and upgrade skills to keep pace and grow. Capabilities for Talent Development presents the new ATD Capability Model, a powerful framework to guide the profession in what practitioners need to know and do to develop themselves, others, and their organizations. ATD's research shows that the future of work will require talent development professionals to leverage interpersonal skills, along with their professional expertise, to work as a true business partner to achieve organizational goals. As organizations respond to trends in business, science, and technology—such as artificial intelligence and automation, brain-based learning, new ways to enlist skilled talent brought on by the gig economy, and other factors—professionals must develop their knowledge and skills from three domains of practice:

• Building Personal Capability
• Developing Professional Capability
• Impacting Organizational CapabilityCapabilities for Talent Development offers an in-depth look at the Model and its components, drawing from the research behind it. Inside are application tips for individuals, educators, and organizations, as well as examples and interviews with thought leaders that describe an exciting future ahead for the talent development field. The ATD Capability Model is future-oriented and can help you personalize your development needs. Grow your career as you grow your knowledge and skills in talent development.

1

What Is Talent Development?

Talent development has almost as many definitions as there are people who practice it. Definitions vary by country and culture, by industry, by organizational strategy, and by the responsibilities of the people practicing it. To some, talent development is an important tool for unleashing human potential. To others, it is a set of practical capabilities for driving organizational performance, productivity, and results. Talent development may also be a primary mechanism for driving organizational performance, productivity, and results by creating the processes, systems, and frameworks that foster learning to maximize individual performance, and for collaborating with business leaders to align development activities with strategic business priorities and outcomes.

Talent development is also a profession—an occupation filled with talented and passionate individuals that involves training and formal qualifications. To support the field, ATD develops models specifying what a TD professional needs to know and be able to do. This is common practice in most professions.

The ATD Certification Institute (ATD CI), an independent organization created by ATD to set industry standards for the talent development profession, administers two credentials based on the ATD models. An associate-level credential is available to those early in their career, with a professional-level credential available to those with more extensive experience.

The Evolution of the Profession

To understand where the profession is headed requires looking back at the history of talent development. First known as training, the field established a foothold in organizations through the design of instruction and its delivery to employees, managers, and leaders to equip them to perform their jobs with success. Training took over where formal education left off, preparing employees to be successful in work roles that were often particular to an industry or organization.

Over the years, as organizations and the work their employees did became more complex and as successful performance came to depend more on employees’ know-how and the ability to learn and change, training morphed into a broad set of capabilities focused on improving organizational performance. Training and workplace learning continued its evolution to talent development as focus shifted from providing instruction to enabling employees to learn and grow by the best and most appropriate methods talent developers could make available. Members of the profession stepped up to the role of strategic partner with the responsibility of deliberately enhancing human capability in the service of operational excellence.

Today, the role of many talent development functions is to tie development to the organization, drive the learning agenda, optimize the learning environment, and leverage the technology and science of learning.

THOUGHT LEADER VOICES

As trusted advisors guiding decisions on talent development and change management, trainers become policy makers, consultants, business partners, and even analysts.

—Jonathan Halls, President and CEO,
Jonathan Halls & Associates

Who Are TD Professionals and What Do They Do?

Talent development is a rich tapestry of theories and practices, and its practitioners have always come from a variety of starting points. Some begin as subject matter experts who are tapped to teach others. Some enter the profession with degrees in fields such as human resource development or organizational behavior. Many others come to the profession from careers in fields as diverse as education, economics, engineering, political science, psychology, management, and the humanities.

TD professionals hold education and learning in high esteem, and as a group they are well educated. ATD research in 2019 showed that among U.S.-based TD professionals, 87 percent had at least a four-year college degree, 44 percent had a master’s degree, and 5 percent had doctoral or professional degrees. The most common subject areas for a master’s degree, besides human resources and organization development, were business, business administration, and education, including instructional design, educational technology, and curriculum and instruction.

THOUGHT LEADER VOICES

A true talent development practitioner sees the entire picture of talent development and how it integrates within an organization.

—Wendy Gates Corbett, CPTD,
President, Refresher Training LLC

In addition, TD professionals play many roles, ranging from specialists such as instructional designers, coaches, or consultants, to generalists who use a broad spectrum of practices to achieve organizational goals. All practitioners have the responsibility to foster learning, use technology to maximize its accessibility, and partner with others to align development with strategic priorities. These pathways to the talent development field engender different perspectives on the scope of practice. As a result, there is no single type of TD professional.

Today, TD professionals serve in organizations and as consultants and are the leading agents of change and transformation in many organizations. They work to align learning with new directions and help firms manage the human elements of change. It is now common for TD professionals to advance to top-level roles serving the priorities of CEOs and executive teams.

Variety in the talent development profession is also reflected in the changing demographics of ATD members. Founded 75 years ago as the American Society of Training Directors, the association originally served practitioners in the United States. Today, ATD members represent 123 countries spanning six continents. Top countries include Australia, Canada, China, Germany, India, Japan, Korea, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and the United Kingdom.

Changes in the Work Environment

In the years since the release of the 2013 ASTD Competency Model, the world’s work environment has changed considerably. Technology has enabled the disruption of entire industries and forced many organizations to adapt in real time to stay viable. Predicting and developing human capability to meet future goals has become a strategy for success.

Economists, social scientists, neurologists, educators, game developers, tech entrepreneurs, and consultants all have something to say about where work is headed in the future. Many of their predictions are similar: Work will be more collaborative and team-oriented, more automated, and more entangled with social technology. And it will change faster than ever.

However, one thing is already clear: Work in the future will demand more learning and the ability to learn faster.

For the talent development profession, three evergreen topics—leadership, change, and technology—are likely to remain important in the future, but technology will consume greater attention because it will continue to revolutionize the way people buy, work, communicate, and learn. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty has said, “Every job will require some technology, and therefore we’ll have to revamp education. The K-12 curriculum is obvious, but it’s the adult retraining—lifelong learning systems—that will be even more important.”

THOUGHT LEADER VOICES

How organizations manage talent is one of the only discernible competitive advantages left as they get bigger and become more automated.

—Karl Kapp, Professor and Consultant,
Bloomsburg University, Institute for
Interactive Technologies

It’s a safe assumption that upskilling employees and steering them to new careers will be a larger part of TD professionals’ work in the near future. So will efforts to help people work collaboratively using technology. Other new roles might involve mediating the use of social tools for learning and work, helping learners manage their learning time, and increasing organizations’ social media savvy. Change management will also be bigger than ever.

It seems certain that artificial intelligence (AI) will be a defining issue in the workplace of the future—and a hard one to keep up with because the technology advances constantly. Many express wariness of AI because it’s predicted to take away jobs through automation and will require reskilling for those who are displaced by it. Experts believe that creative jobs and those requiring social interaction, such as managing people, will be safe for a while, but many more types of work will disappear or become too technical for the people who currently hold them. The management consulting firm McKinsey & Company predicts full employment for humans until 2030 but also says that half of today’s work activities could be automated using current technology.

Based on this continuous change and uncertainty, ATD’s 2019 Competency Study determined that the model for the profession should include, for the first time, specific skills related to imagining and preparing for the future of learning and work.

A Capability Model for You

Success in this new landscape of talent development requires a shift to a proactive, business-partner mindset. Professionals in the future will need to anticipate and diagnose individual and organizational needs and create situations that enable individuals to reach their full potential.

Whether you are a trainer, an independent consultant, or a director of a learning function within an organization, and whether you are entering the field at the beginning of your career or have transitioned to it later in life, you are a TD professional. We have designed the Talent Development Capability Model for you—to reflect what you need to know and do now and in the future as a TD professional operating on the leading edge of best practice.

2

The Talent Development Capability Model

Since 1978, nine competency studies and models have tracked the evolution of the profession from a focus on training design and delivery to its broader role as a strategic business partner. The 1983 Models for Excellence study was the first to define training and development. In 1989, Models for HRD Practice redefined the profession to include career and organization development. The focus of the 1996 model was human performance improvement, followed two years later by the ASTD Models for Learning Technologies, and then Models for Workplace Learning and Performance in 1999. The 2004 model provided a foundation for competency-based certification.

The 2013 Competency Study addressed changes driven by the collapse of the global economy in 2008 and the resulting recession. It was the first to address the impact on the profession of digital, mobile, and social technologies transforming the workplace. And it drew attention to the mindset shift occurring in the workforce with the arrival of new generations of workers. The study also challenged long-held assumptions about talent management, measurement and evaluation of lear...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. What Is Talent Development?
• 2. The Talent Development Capability Model
• 3. The Capability Model Domains and Capabilities
• 4. Applying the Capability Model
• 5. Examples of Applying the Capability Model
• 6. A Call to Action for the Talent Development Profession
• Appendix A. The Research Behind the Capability Model
• Appendix B. Prior ATD Competency Studies and Key Findings
• Appendix C. Data Collection Details
• Project Contributors
• References
• About the Authors
• Back Cover