Talent Management - Integrating Talent and Knowledge Management: Where Are the Benefits?

In today's business world, it has become very essential for companies to be able to identify, train, and retain their most precious asset. Unlike what people used to think, it isn't money or equipment, but instead the people that the company employs. Without being able to keep the most talented people around, companies will face a high turnover and could never reach their full potential. This practice has come to be called "talent management" throughout the business community. It is a practice that is becoming increasingly used and researched throughout the world.

Integrating talent and knowledge management: where are the benefits?

Author(s): Eoin Whelan and Marian Carcary

The focus of this article was to, as the title says, look at talent management from a knowledge management standpoint. The article starts out by defining knowledge, and noting that it has become possibly the most important, but worst managed, asset of a company. Managing the workers who have the best knowledge of the company and how things are done is very important, and these workers also normally may be your most talented workers. This article continues on, and defines what Talent Management is before diving into its research. Talent management is concerned with developing strategies, recruiting, educating, and maintaining the companies most talented employees. The article then goes in depth about how the concepts of talent management can be used to further advance the use of knowledge management. As I read through the article, it made some good points about how instead of identifying two separate groups as your knowledge and your talent, companies should find ways to identify people that are both knowledgeable and talented. From there the companies need to work on taking this "key talent" developing it and maintaining it to even further advance their companies. It does point out that the down side to doing this would be the isolation of other employees. There would be fewer and fewer people that would be identified as "key talent" and they may then feel like they weren't appreciated enough which could in turn decrease the productivity.

What do we mean by the term "talent" in talent management?

Author: Carole Tansley

This article focused on how the word talent has been used over time in different parts of the world, and how it is used in the term talent management now. The article first points out that talent has many different meanings and that meaning can change from organization to organization. It then goes on to show what some of the different definitions of the word are. The first one it brings up is completely off base to the topic, as it talks about talent being used as a word for weight, money, and so on. It wasn't until later on in the 19th century that talent came to mean closely to what most of us think it means now, which is a person with great ability. The author then moves on to talk about people being born with talent, called innate, and how this is used to attempt to predict future successes. This is an unsafe method, and it is argued that instead talent comes from an individual's learning experiences instead. Then she finally gets to the part that pertains to this class, and this is the context of talent inside of organizations. This is another area that is hard to define the author says, as it varies from person to person and organization to organization. There are people who argue that most companies don't know what talent is or how to manage it at all. After looking from company to company for answers, it becomes clear that most definitions of talent are set to be specific to what the organizational needs and values. Common threads do occur though, such as someone having drive, knowledge, skills, and cognitive abilities. Carole concludes by saying that talent management is in the early stages of being studied and will continue to further advance. It is important for companies to be able to define what they are looking for in talented individuals and for employees to know what their employers are looking for as well.

Talent Management in Academies

Author(s): Brent Davies and Barbara J. Davies

This article got into how and why talent management could be effective if used in a school type setting. The authors introduce the topic by saying that talent management could help the school