Talent & Economic Growth

Posted by Anne Hamill

It’s official – the UK economy is now showing strong growth. How does this impact our talent strategy?

The immediate risk is of a ‘brain drain’. Many talented people have been frustrated by slow career progress during the 5 years of economic crisis and recession. With companies downsizing and the public sector making major cuts, there were few new jobs created. And people with tenure were not leaving at a normal rate – the fear of being ‘last in, first out’ slowed the movement between organisations to a trickle. This meant even fewer opportunities for promotion. People have seen wages stagnate, and had to settle for sideways moves and job enrichment (often seen as more work for the same pay). With the job market opening up, your best talent will look everywhere – outside as well as inside – to ‘catch up’ in their career.

Question: Have you equipped your most talented people with career skills focused on finding internal promotions?

The good news is that inside large organisations, there are now more internal possibilities for promotion than for many years – and this is going to increase with renewed growth. Unfortunately, many people aren’t aware of how to find these emerging jobs, instead focusing equally on internal and external adverts for their next job.

We have been interviewing successful people in large organisations for 10 years now, and know how they first heard of 5502 key jobs in their career. Only about 9% of these jobs were found by internal adverts. 66% were found by a variety of informal strategies and career tactics, used to find internal opportunities. We’ve documented these strategies in our Think Career card pack, and they underpin our career workshops, conferences and Keynote speeches. Our successful careers statistics clearly show that high performers use these tactics to drive their career inside one organisation for a substantial amount of time. They seem to be an alternative to job-hopping. The most critical action to combat ‘brain drain’ is to increase skill in driving a successful internal career. Every time you lose a good performer or high potential from the business, you create drag – time to recruit, time to build up good performance, time to build a network that makes it easy to deliver fast. This drag impedes growth.

Take Away
The top priority on the Talent Agenda when economic growth starts after recession is to retain talented people. Quick action should be taken to equip them with strong internal career skills to accelerate their career progression – inside your organisation.

On 7th April, we are running an event “Talented People: The Career Crisis” to share examples of our career data, and a range of ways our clients tackle this issue. Contact us to register your interest. The event will be free, and held in Central London.