learndirect Business commissioned Cranfield School of Management to investigate whether it is better to 'make' or 'buy' talented staff in your organisation. 

The Nurturing Talent report shows that developing and implementing a long-term strategy focused on nurturing talent provides real business benefits for all types of organisations.

Staff costs are often the single biggest outlay for organisations. Therefore, it is logical that this investment is managed effectively to ensure employees are retained and developed in a way that helps improve business performance.

The report, based on research conducted amongst more than a thousand others in your situation, previous evidence in the area, as well as interviews with organisations like yours found:

* Continuous staff development is an important part of driving growth, especially when times are tough the advantages of nurturing staff are clearly even more evident
   
* A vast majority of employers (78%) believe that internal development of employees has greater benefit to the organisation than external recruitment (22%)

* Almost half of respondents (44%) agreed that they had saved money by growing their own talent

* More than half felt using internal development helped them to retain talent (52%). Internal recruitment was most commonly used by employers to improve retention and motivation of staff (35% and 33% respectively)
 
* External recruitment has an important part to play, not least when business success requires firms to hire in order to increase capacity

It also details several real life examples where employee development has had a positive impact on the organisation:

* Mines Rescue, a Health and Safety consultancy used training in order to develop new skills in their employees. As a result of this it expanded its customer base from five to more than 1,400 and boosted turnover to over £8 million a year

* In North America, Southwest Airlines trained its way out of a recession. It reduced recruitment but at the same time actually increased its training budget to maintain morale. This move ensured it had the skills that it needed to survive the 2001 recession and even turn a profit

* In the UK, book publisher Bertram Group focuses on employee development to help retain and motivate existing staff. An additional knock-on benefit is that the organisation is seen as attractive to potential employees – helping it compete for talent within the labour market.

Read our case studies and find out more about these examples and other organisations which have benefited from nurturing their existing workforce .

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By LaunchLab.co.uk  on   Nov 07,2008

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Keywords

skills    employees    training    development    staff    business growth   

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