Still in an early stage of development, the Strategic Talent Experience is moving the discussion substantially beyond the prior Integrated Talent Management (ITM) concept, which was primarily about process improvement and system integration – in other words, about operational excellence or efficiency (and therefore cost), not strategic capability that provides a basis for competitive advantage and digital innovation. Current industry thinking is tending to focus on strategic program alignment (a good thing, if stakeholder focused) – this is business design.

However, this thinking often misses a crucial dimension: the employee-facing one that addresses directly the people companies most want to influence. For employees, a meaningful talent experience involves tangible and practical aspects of development and career management presented holistically in the context of one’s current job and future career path. Notions of individual development should be aligned to business strategy and career mobility across an organization.

Thus, current talent experiences often fail to address strategic and common talent-related pain points.

Talent strategies often do not offer specifics on thinking through the “how” for realizing digital strategy in the organization and creating the tangible aspects of what employees discretely see, hear, touch, or interact with – the physical, social, and online dimensions of what is known increasingly as the employee experience. Also in play is the idea of “cultural shaping” to drive new mindsets (and thus employee behaviors), as is experiential and traditional learning to establish required new knowledge and skills.

In contrast, a digital-first approach provides a foundation for addressing these talent pain points by identifying the specific practices needed to realize digital business strategy and evaluating these practices in the context of both employee behaviors and digitally-enabled work design.

The talent experience should weave seamlessly together all tangible and practical aspects of employee development and career management.

Business transformations driven by digital market forces demand a contemporary approach to organizational, people, and talent strategies that is grounded in modern business design methods.  Talent-related capabilities are a smart place to look for enterprise-level digital value because they span core business operations and competencies. These capabilities are complementary and fundamentally supportive of all business-specific needs.

Finding, developing, and enabling talent to achieve digital business goals requires a focus on engendering and leveraging the right digital skills and behaviors, structured in new digitally-influenced work practices, and anchored deeply in digital tools.