Developing established talent is more about impact than skills

Companies focus a lot of effort in developing new and early career employees. This makes sense since knowledge and skills are primarily gained through experience. The less career experience employees have, the more they benefit from development programs focused on providing knowledge and skills[1]. But this development does little to maximize the potential of the biggest part of the workforce: “established talent”. ?

The phrase established talent describes employees who have been in their careers long enough to have a good understanding of their profession, their workstyles, how to be effective in their roles, and what they want from their careers. I suspect most people reach the level of established talent after about 15 years in their career. It occurs when people's development focus shifts from “how can I build a successful career” to “how can I maximize the value of the career I have”. Given 50% of the US workforce is over the age of 42, the majority of employees in most companies fit the definition of established talent. Many of these people are not looking to climb the corporate ladder. But they are not looking to stop working and developing either, despite the ageism they experience in many industries.?Companies do not want them to leave given the value of their knowledge combined with growing staffing shortages. The challenge is figuring out what types of development will maximize the engagement and value of people who already have a high level of competence in their roles and a fairly good awareness of where they want to go in life.

Some insightful work on understanding the difference between developing early career talent versus established talent comes from succession management programs. A person who runs one of these programs told me it does not make sense to call an executive who is running a large global department a “high potential”. They have already shown they can successfully lead. They are not “high potential leaders”, they are “highly experienced, capable leaders”. Development of these leaders is not about building leadership skills. It is about helping them use their existing skills to maximize the impact they have on the business. Development of these leaders focuses on giving them challenging assignments that both leverage and stretch their existing leadership capabilities.

I was reminded of this during a recent conversation with HR leaders about retaining late career employees who could potentially retire. Many ideas were things I had heard before such as redesigning jobs to focus on developing others or allowing employees to work part-time flexible schedules rather than retire completely. But the most interesting examples centered on working with established talent to find new ways to use their existing skills. For example, experienced nurses being asked to redesign patient care systems instead of just providing direct patient care. Or experienced engineers being asked to provide input into the company’s growth strategy in addition to building products. In these examples, employees were not identified for development assignments based on their potential to learn new skills. They were chosen based on their potential to use their existing knowledge to have a larger impact beyond their current role.

People feel valued and rewarded when they can apply their skills to make an impact on something they care about. The more established people are in their careers, the less they want to spend time doing activities focused on acquiring skills for themselves or jockeying to get the next promotion.?What they want is to develop ways to apply and expand their existing skills to increase the influence they have on their world. As the workforce continues to age, I suspect we will see more creation of established talent development programs focused on increasing impact instead of acquiring new capabilities. It is useful to remind ourselves that the average tenure of professional employees in the US is about 5 years, and 5 years of performance is 5 years of performance regardless of whether it happens at the beginning or end of a person’s career. There is tremendous value in making the most of the time employees give to companies across all phases of the employment lifecycle.

[1] This is one cause of the false stereotypical belief that younger generations are more interested in growth and development than previous generations. It has little to do with age, but is a function of career experience. Someone starting a new career at 50 is likely to share a similar development orientation as someone starting a new career at 25.