It’s often hard for me to believe that Talent Management has existed for more than a decade. It’s even harder for me to wrap my head around the magazine’s original title, Workforce Performance Solutions.
Indeed, most great things in life that stand the test of time seldom do so without undergoing continuous evolution. Talent Management is no exception.
Almost every company can speak to the evolutionary changes that shaped its successes and — hopefully to a lesser extent — its failures. As we head into the second half of 2016, Talent Management is set to embark on the next stage of its evolutionary journey.
Talent’s role in today’s economy is ever more dynamic, and the practice of attracting, retaining and managing it is no longer confined to the world of human resources. Like a precious metal, talent has become a scarce resource in today’s global economy, one that is challenging leaders’ ability to navigate the current economic landscape.
While capital and infrastructure are necessary to build a successful business, both are limited in their ability to sustain competitive advantage without the right talent. And with skills shortages proliferating throughout the economy, the risks associated with mismanaging human capital are high.
In September, the publication will take a step toward addressing the evolutionary role of talent by re-launching under a new title, Talent Economy.
The mission of Talent Economy is to provide leaders with insights that capture the changing nature of people, organization and innovation that is propelling the modern business environment.
Consider the lengths that Wall Street giants Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, JPMorgan and others are taking to reframe their value propositions to employees amid the wave of talent flocking to Silicon Valley — where the charm of changing the world through technology has emboldened a new class of entrepreneurial gusto.
These famed financial institutions are rethinking how they manage to attract in-demand technology-minded grads to work in their firms’ historically bruising and status-driven work environments.
Similarly, General Electric, long the beacon of American ingenuity, is now casting itself as a tech company in the hopes that future generations of workers will spurn the allure of Facebook, Google and Uber for a decades-long career with the century-old organization.
The mission of Talent Economy is to provide leaders with insights that capture the changing nature of people, organization and innovation that is propelling the modern business environment.
Meanwhile, as organizations adapt how they attract, develop and retain talent, the so-called gig economy is disrupting old mores around contingent and freelance work — to the extent that institutions are re-examining what it means to be an employee and workers are reconsidering their desire to be one.
These shifts require a new perspective on talent that speaks directly to the pivotal role it plays in business and speaks broadly to the concerns of every company’s decision-makers and leaders.
With Talent Economy will come a new website that covers the strategic importance of today’s evolving talent dynamic through daily and weekly digital content.
Supplementing the digital experience will be a quarterly print journal, which come October will feature stories written by leading thinkers, researchers and journalists, in addition to interviews with top authors, economists and others who are influencing the talent trade.
We believe Talent Economy will go above and beyond what Talent Management accomplished. Throughout its decade in existence, Talent Management has both covered the widespread transformation of HR as a strategic practice and contributed to it through the community it has built and the conversations it has started among executives.
Now, it’s time for the publication to expand on that tradition by shifting the conversation around talent from one that was delegated to HR to one that is elevated to the very top of the executive C-suite.
This story originally appeared under Talent Economy’s former moniker, Talent Management.
