1. Make talent development a core part of your business

This means not just improving your skills and learning approach but getting much more creative with how and where you identify and develop the people you want to work for you.

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This will require a step-change in attitude from many organizations, because while most hiring processes are extremely linear, an organization’s talent needs rarely are.

It’ll no longer simply be enough to try and buy skills from outside the organization (especially since the traditional interviewing process isn’t a particularly effective or efficient way to find the skills you need).

Instead, you’ll need to start with a thorough audit of your existing talent base in order to determine what skills they already bring to the table, and what skills they wish they had.

You’ll also need to get used to hiring people who aren’t perfect for the job. Traditional HR teams expect their candidates to meet 80-90% of the criteria for a role on hire. But in the future, you may need to accept they’ll only have 50% – and focus much more closely on their capacity to learn the other 50% while they work with you.

In the long term, taking the right approach to talent development doesn’t just mean figuring out what skills you need and getting hold of them. It means figuring out what skills you want your people to leave the organization with – and where you want them to go next.