Talented Employees Can They Be Made?

Talented Employees Can They Be Made?

Date: 14/01/2017

Today we hear and see a lot talking about the power of knowledge, knowledge economy knowledge is power, and we heard before a lot about hard working employees, smart employees, professional employees, experts employees and so on. Although we totally agree about the importance of all these terms and what it means but human beings  always seek and obtained knowledge even in the old centuries, craftsmen, artists,  scientist and engineers are all known before time since knowledge is always there for people to grasp and learn so what is new this time?

Today organizations are looking for talented people who possess certain knowledge, skills and behaviors that is difficult to be copy or teach mostly people are born with it or just be in extremely environment that help create it, sometimes these talents are like a diamond in the rough where people are not aware of it or not fully master it but it can be put in use once who possess it trained and develop it. This practice is known as talent management so again what is new about this subject?

Employees today are not anymore compared by their qualification, or professional certification or even performance, all these today have become available to all who seek it and even its provided in low cost sometimes, but the thing that make organization not looking for these criteria's anymore is the dynamic business environment that technology advancement brought and increase the competitiveness to its extreme that its make the critter's change for employees also.  Employees today can access knowledge by just one click on their laptop, smart phones and tablets they can find millions of information and knowledge about any subject at anytime anywhere and in any format they want it, although knowledge is power but with this huge amount of information no human being can process and save it in their mind and since its available on the net for everyone there is no point to make the effort for it, so the question now is does employees use knowledge to obtain talent that might be wanted in the market even if they are not born with it?

Leadership has the same dilemma  do leaders born or made, talent as well has the same are born with it or we can make it, if we have close look to talents there are many types of talents in the world some could be classified as born but the rest can be made. Talent in business world are a mixture of special knowledge and behaviors that produce skills so unique to be copied or teach, it’s the same as Japanese martial arts or Chinese martial arts where the master teach the student the way of being a true fighter, employees as well can learn from all these available information and knowledge on the internet and experts people and mix it with their environment, mindset, workplace, experience and experiments, knowledge and produce a unique skills in a certain field that will be competitive in the market and needed by the organizations, the secret in doing this is to have a clear vision and goal on what to direct all these mixture toward to and keep going till the skills are born and talent is made ready for use.

By just looking to people around us we all have certain level of talent in some filed because we keep going on in gathering information and knowledge and experience and experiment in it but without being  aware that we are building a talent we could not go till the end to make it a talent ready to be used in the market as competitive advantage among other employees, and that is the difference between talented business people and employs the way of using knowledge and information available and obtained in today world of technology.

Mohamed Alzayani

 assoc.CIPD and  assoc.IHRME for human capital management and development