Hi, welcome to module two. In this module, we're going to discuss talent development and the role of instructional design. Notice that I said the role of instructional design, not the role of instructional designers because there are differences between the two. We'll pick this up again toward the end of the module, and it will make sense to you. So, what is talent development? In effort to move the field forward, a student of mine and I create this definition, and we're trying to capture some of the core considerations of talent development. We think that talent development is a comprehensive system that consists of a set of values, activities, and processes with the aim of improving all willing and capable individuals for the mutual benefit of individuals, host organisation, and the society as a whole. First of all, it is a system. A system has to have a number of characteristics. For example, generally speaking, a system has to have inputs and outputs, and the number of components that are interrelated or interacting with each other, so something can be produced out of the system. A system also has to have a purpose. A system has to be situated in a particular context, and so forth. So, for talent development system, the input and output are people, so-called talents. The interacting components are learning and development activities and processes. The purpose is to improve people, if I can put it simplistically. The context then is within an organization. So, the goal of talent development is to provide improvement opportunities through learning and development activities to the employees who are willing and considered by the organization as talent, or potential talents, or sometimes called high potentials. You may ask at this point, what kind of development activities and processes are included in a talent development system? Who makes the decisions on what to include and not to include in a system? Who provide or design the activities or processes? Who are the talent or high potentials? Who are making these decisions? Before we start to answer these questions, let me give you some background information. So, talent development is a emerging field. We can see that the naming of the field started with a book published by McKinsey and Company in 1997. The book is titled The War for Talent. This book essentially is the kickoff of the development of the fields of talent development and talent management. It help the framing of a challenge that business leaders have been facing over the years. Since the publication of the book, the field of talent development has quickly gained popularity among business leaders. It is because many of them has been struggling with talent retention and talent shortage, due to the rapid expansion of globalization and technology advancement. Talent shortage has been ranked as one of the top business challenges for years by business leaders. The development of the field of talent development filled this void. So, one of the obvious examples of this rapid popularity is the naming change of the largest professional association that deals with employee learning and development in the whole world, ASTD, is the American Society for Training and Development. In May of 2014, ASTD decided to change its name from American Society for Training and Development to The Association for Talent Development. Quoting from the official reason for this name change is "To better meet the needs and represent the work of this dynamic profession." The challenges of shortage of skilled and knowledge worker, global competition, technology advancement, all have contributed to this emergence of talent development. Another evidence is represented by the number of publications about talent development. If you just open Google Scholar and type talent management, talent, or talent development, you will have a huge number of hits. So, that is another evidence that the field is gaining popularity. So, please pause the video and write down on a piece of paper, when you hear the word talent, what comes to mind? The likelihood of you writing something down that's relate to gifted children, sports talent are pretty high. This is because the term talent has been used in many different ways, in many different contexts previously, such as a gifted children, gifted education, someone is a genius, sports talent, we often hear about that in the baseball and basketball fields. Hence, we must know exactly what we are talking about when we are discussing talent and talent development in organizational settings because if we they don't, we'll suffer from ambiguity in both definition and scope. Therefore, as talent development gains popularity in Human Resource Management, and development, literature, and among practitioners, we must give it a clear definition, but here comes another problem. Often is the case, it's very difficult for scholars and practitioners to agree on a precise definition because they're always different opinions, and the practices are practiced in different context. So, the question we may ask, does it refer to an aptitude or abilities in a person? Or does it refers to extraordinary performance for a person? So, what is the context then? Such as differences in technical fields and differences in industry sectors, all of this could influence the way a organization approach their talents selection and talent development strategies. So, research have categorized the current practices into two major views toward talent. Simply speaking, there's a subjective view towards talent and there is a objective view toward talent. The subject view sees talent as people. So, who are those people? Are they all the employees within the organization? Are they high potentials? Are they certain level of managers? Are they people with certain specialized skills? So, those are the views of subjective perspectives. There's a objective's perspective, which sees talent as a set of characteristics of people such as the natural abilities of people, the skill of masteries of certain skill sets, the commitment to the organization, and are fit with the context of where that person is practicing. Well, the objective perspective they see that this characteristics has to work together. See if someone has a natural ability and a skill but doesn't have the commitment and the fit and that person can also fail the organization, there's no lack of examples out there. If you search on the example of GE and Home Depot, or the Apple, and Pepsi, you can find those examples. So, it's very important for talent to not only have the natural ability, the skills but also have commitment and fit. Another important consideration is if an organization takes an inclusive or exclusive approach toward talent development. The inclusive approach is to include everyone within the organization, consider everybody has talent. The exclusive approach is only include a group of people. That may be a group of high potentials, or certain level of managers, or some critical skills, people who have critical skills and so forth. So, if we put them together in a matrix, we can come up with four type of approaches. One is inclusive subjective approach. In here, we see all employees are talented people. Another one will be inclusive objective approach. In here, we see all employees has talent who have a set of desired characteristics that may include skills, abilities, commitment, and fit. The third one will be exclusive subjective approach, where we see a group of employees as talented people and we only focus on this group. There will be another one is called exclusive objective approach, we'll see a group of employees has talents who has a set of desired characteristics. So, we can see how these approaches may impact the organization's strategy in selecting talent development strategies. For example, who they select as talent, and the design of learning and development activities, who are they targeting? What level of management are they targeting? What kind of skills are they targeting? Those all impact the talent development strategies, plannings, and activities you put together. Certainly, there's a number of potential benefits of a well-run talent development program. For example, from an individual perspective, the employees can learn new skills, new competencies and by doing so, they will have increased their employability. And because of that, they will get promoted and they will progress in their careers, or they become valuable employee for other companies who to they will approach with higher salaries and maybe better futures. From organizational perspective, it helps promote alignment between an organization's values and culture to a talent development strategies. Why I say that? Is because if organization of core value has to inline with how you select your talents. If you believe only a small group of people are important, you will choose a exclusive approach. If you believe everybody are important, you'll choose a inclusive approach. In addition, this talent development can also engage talents. While they're in the talent development program, they will feel like they are paid attention to, and so we create psychological contract with the talents and attract them to come to your company, and to be motivated to work hard and engage them to stay. So, talent development can also be used as a talent retention strategy. So, these are the benefits. But there are also many criticisms of talent development. So, first of all, some have argued that it's just a rebranding effort of HRD and HRM. HRD stands for Human Resource Development and HRM stands for Human Resource Management. They believe there is nothing new to it because we had been doing that all along. Some have argued that it maybe potentially create inequality because of the exclusive approach that many company practice. Certain group of people may get in a lot more training than the others. That will create the feeling of otherness. Create you against us mentality, the high potentials and the non-high potentials, or someone may call them low potentials. That will demotivate the employees who are not labeled as high potentials. And what about the people that are currently occupying low skill and low paying positions, what about them? So, they will perceive the treatment of extensive resources provided to a small group of people as unjust or unequal. In addition, if not careful, a program may perpetuate discrimination toward minorities and women. Historically, we have a smaller representation of minority and woman in managerial positions. Many times because there's a small percentage of them in those positions, they will have lack of mentors, lack of support networks, lack of senior leaders who knows them, so they'll be able to advocate for those minority and women employees. So, that will perpetuate the problem. There are also potentials for ethical challenges. If we treat people as means to make money for the organization and ignore the well-being of the individual employees, then we'll run into ethical challenges. Therefore, we need to take this criticisms into consideration whenever we operationalize talent development in our organizations. I'm going to use this as example to provide what talent development may entail. ATD provide this competency model to capture the 10 areas of expertise of talent development professionals. It also can be seen as all the activities that a talent development system or programs may involve, may entail. These 10 areas are performance improvement, instructional design, training delivery, learning technology, evaluating learning impact, managing learning programs, integrated talent management, coaching, knowledge management, and change management. I'm not going to go into details of every all those areas because that will take a long time, but I want to point out one thing in this list. You can see that instructional design, which is this course is about is one of the 10 areas of expertise of talent development professionals. Remember in the beginning, I said that the role of instructional design and the role of the instructional designer maybe different. So, the role of instructional design is to support the goal of talent development by design training programs and curriculums. However, an instructional designer may have more than just one area of expertise. For example, an instructional designer may also deliver training programs, may use learning technology, may design evaluation to measure learning impacts, and so forth. So, the work of an instructional designer is essential to the success of talent development. Later in the course, I will provide further discussions on the topic of talent development. Thank you.
