Top Talent Development Strategies in 2021
Bradford R. GlaserUpdated March 2026
Talent development shouldn’t be on the back burner. Creating a strategic plan to elevate your employees will put you ahead of the competition and help you achieve your business goals. Explore these top talent development strategies to create or improve your approach.
- Create a performance management plan
- Establish performance measurements
- Hold productive performance conversations
Table of Contents
What Is Talent Development?
Talent development is more than simply training your team in new skills. It’s about recognizing an employee's potential, identifying their strengths, and placing them in positions where they are most likely to succeed. By providing specialized training to help improve what your employees are already best at, you’ll find that their job satisfaction, productivity, and retention rate will increase.
Align Development Goals with Your Company Mission
The best way to create effective, meaningful talent development goals is by aligning them with your company's mission. If your mission is unclear, get with management to rework or improve upon it. This will serve as a solid foundation for your talent development strategy. Plus, it shows employees what’s important to the company as a whole and why you want to help them grow.
With your mission secured, hone in on specific development goals. For instance, are you looking to enhance your customer service team because your mission is to provide quality care? Perhaps you’re hoping to groom new supervisors since the company aims to offer top-tier leadership. Whatever the case, pinpoint exactly what talent areas you’re trying to develop.
Next, divide each of these goals into required skills. Doing so will show you what you need to search for in the right employee and start developing your training. Using the above customer service example, some skills that might be necessary to perfect in this field include communication, conflict management, and emotional intelligence.
Assess Your Team and Candidates
To find out who is most proficient in the skills you’ve identified, a great strategy is to provide your team and potential hires with a soft skills assessment. A quick assessment can reveal valuable information about each team member, particularly their top strengths and weaknesses. This can help you determine how you need to reorganize or train certain employees to help them succeed and meet your company's goals.
HRDQ offers a comprehensive library of online assessments, professionally designed to gauge individual soft skills. Explore the HRDQ Online Assessment Center.
Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill
When it comes to placing someone in a new position, it’s a beneficial strategy to hire for attitude rather than train for skill. Those who are willing and hungry to learn will likely be your most successful employees. They’ll be eager to run with the talent development training you provide so that they can continue to grow. Plus, since you’ll already know their top skills based on the assessment you provide, you can only expect those skills to grow increasingly stronger with the right attitude and great training.
Make Talent Development Part of Workplace Culture
Talent development shouldn’t be a short-term endeavor. If you really want your business to thrive, you need to create a long-term talent development plan. Companies that emphasize employee growth as part of their workplace culture often find greater success. It shows your team that you’re invested in their careers within your business.
The best way to integrate talent development into your workplace culture is by creating an effective process for designing training programs. Depending on your needs and goals, you’ll likely need to design and implement several different types of talent development training. Plus, as your needs and goals change, the content within your programs will have to change as well. Or, you may need to scrap old training entirely in place of something new.
That’s why it’s imperative to have a solid process for creating effective training programs. It allows you to adjust your talent development training to keep up with individuals and trends as they grow and change.
Start Training with HRDQ
We hope these talent development strategies help you improve your team. If you’re ready to equip your employees with the skills they need to succeed, get started with HRDQ today.
Our downloadable and customizable course, Ongoing Performance Development, helps participants develop a four-step approach that focuses on setting clear expectations for individual performance based on organizational goals, as well as ways to provide feedback and customized training.
