Organizations are facing a pivotal moment in the shaping of talent strategies.

The “one size fits all” talent strategy is increasingly failing to attract, develop, and retain top technical experts. Talent strategies that focus mainly on leadership pipelines leave their organizations exposed to huge risks in the effective management of expert talent.

The fallout? Organizations are not creating an optimum environment for technical experts to create the most value and to support organizational success. This failure has a significant impacts, with organizations:

• failing to leverage full value from their experts, which can be fatal when it comes to the organization delivering on its innovation agenda.

• finding it more difficult and expensive to attract talented technical experts.

• finding it more difficult and expensive to retain talented technical experts, because expert employees become disillusioned, disengaged, and flight risks.

• struggling to engage and motivate their experts to achieve their full value-creating potential.

• facing a looming technical brain drain.

• struggling to ideate and execute an innovative agenda.

The success of modern organizations increasingly will depend on the quality and capability of the technical experts it can attract, develop, and retain. This requires a expert talent strategy, differentiated from a one-size-fits all talent strategy biased towards leadership.

Global trends

Several global trends are exacerbating the challenge.

• While overall talent scarcity remains high, the demand for workers has become highly asymmetric, favoring expert specialists over generalists and entry-level employees.

• Whether the organization serves the community or customers, there is a relentless drive to find efficiencies and create new value. The innovations required to achieve these goals are often ideated by experts.

• The advent of AI and its capability to automate repetitive activities increases the importance of deep subject matter expertise being a combination of deep technical proficiency and human cognitive skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration, and problem-solving. These latter skills often need developing in technical experts.

• Beyond the corporate sector, regulatory mandates and compliance frameworks are driving the need for certified technical experts in energy, infrastructure, and environment.

According to our research and lived experience with clients, most organizations are still currently under-appreciating the mission-critical importance of their expert talent to their strategic success.

Many organizations persist with a one-size-fits-all setting for generalists and experts alike when it comes to their workforce strategy and employee lifecycle such as recruitment, onboarding, talent development, remuneration, career pathing, and even the way in which expert teams are led.

A modern talent strategy for the modern organization

To combat these challenges, first-mover organizations are moving toward agile and segmented people strategies that include skills-based hiring and investing in upskilling programs to keep pace with rapid technological evolution.

They are reacting to the need to have a talent strategy that delivers a Leadership pipeline, but also an Expertship pipeline – that is, a pipeline of expert talent that will sustain and grow the organisations effectiveness and success.

Deploying what we call Organisational Expertship provides leaders with the opportunity to make the changes that lead to the optimum workforce practices, policies, and strategies to attract and retain the best experts and develop them to their full potential. Organisational expertise provides a multi-faceted talent strategy approach that enables organisations to secure and fully leverage the expertise critical to its future.

In our whitepaper “The Rise of Organisational Expertship”, available for download below, we explore the research and evidence to enable leaders and organizational development professionals to design a convincing business case to turn around your expert brain drain, and to be an employer of choice for technical experts.

Or contact us directly for a discussion.