You, Me, We – Managing the talent experience

Today’s world is incredibly unpredictable. Think of all the upheavals businesses have had to weather in recent years, from Brexit, to COVID-19, the Great Resignation, and more. Even before this, there was the 2008 financial meltdown. All of this impacts the world of work, meaning organisations must always prepare for times of instability.

Talent experience and learning have the potential to act as a strategic agent of change here. Why? Because they can be used to unlock change and future market share. It’s a chain reaction: learning leads to curiosity, leads to creativity, leads to discovery, disruption and innovation. Learning holds the key to allowing businesses to navigate the challenging economic environment we find ourselves in.

When it comes to talent experience, there are a number of things that employees want from their employers. They want to feel like all the talent activities that exist are there for a purpose to help nurture their growth and engagement. They want to feel like the experience has been designed and personalised to them and their needs, and evolves as they evolve. They also want to know they have a clear pathway for the future. They want goals, check-ins and performance and development plans.

Skills is also an important area. Our 2022 Global Skills Report found that 87% of employers feel confident in their ability to develop their people’s skills. However, only 55% of employees feel confident in their company’s ability to develop their skills. Suddenly, we’ve seen skilling go from being something we were going to worry about “later”, and “that’s for another day”, to becoming front of mind and with a deep sense of urgency around it.

And it’s not just about identifying development needs, it’s about how organisations pave the path for an individual’s growth. During our 2023 talent mobility study, we found that 73% of workers want to know about career opportunities inside their organisation, and employees who are provided with access to self-service technology for career mobility exploration, are half as likely to have plans to quit their job.

Failing to get a talent strategy right could be disastrous, leading to the proliferation of trends like ‘quiet quitting’ and ‘resenteeism’, and can also prevent an organisation from developing the agility needed to not only survive but truly thrive.

Talent experiences need to be built around providing the learning, skills and career paths that both employee and organisation need.

To balance all of this, organisations need to roll out a talent experience strategy that takes care of the ‘you’, the ‘me’ and the ‘we’. This is where Cornerstone comes in.

This is the corporate strategy. The organisation defines its collective talent needs to reach its organisational goals and manages the distribution of required and prescribed knowledge as well as defines HR processes. Here, Cornerstone provides the talent experience platform to unlock the potential of the workforce, streamline talent activities and align everything to the goals of the business. Through an AI-powered tech fabric, organisations can design smarter workflows and predict trends across people, skills and content data.

This is individual empowerment. Answering individual needs and providing an engaging experience for employees to discover and access knowledge, learning, networks, mentors, projects or gigs, and career pathways in a self-directed way. Cornerstone uses AI to create inspiring, personalised, and connected experiences across learning, skilling, and mobility.

This is about collective intelligence. Using a common skills language, there is an important intersection between employee and company needs and priorities which augments and accelerates innovation. This in turn, drives maximum retention, engagement, and ultimately productivity.

Creating a strong talent experience, with the employee at the centre of everything, is the key to business resilience during challenging times. Cornerstone offers a people growth model for a future-ready workforce, providing a core talent management and an intelligent skills engine, powered by 100 million users and over 55,000 verified skills. By empowering organisations to provide their people with meaningful talent experiences, learning and career pathways, Cornerstone is helping unlock the agility, flexibility and creativity required to navigate times of instability. To find out more about what your organisation can gain from our Talent Experience Platform, see here.