Strategic Talent Management: R&R Time

Kevin Coleman is a highly skilled senior level project and program manager/advisor with experience leading projects with labor budgets ranging from a few hundred thousand dollars to multi-million dollar budgets across multiple industries.

  Strategy  

The challenge of acquiring and guiding human capital has always been daunting, to say the least. Today that challenge is even greater than ever. Adapting to a rapidly advancing set of core technologies commonly used by business is just part of the issue.

Further complicating that challenge is all the new technologies that are coming in the next three to five years: The Internet of Things (IoT), the connected car and wearable computing is just now coming of age, so the number of resources with experience in these technologies is basically zero. However, that is not the biggest challenge.

Organizations now compete in a global environment. Competitors are not half a world away, they are more like one click away. A recent report by the World Economic Forum caught my attention. It ranked countries with regard to human resources when it comes to skills and education. The World Economic Forum used 46 different indicators to come up with the rating, so it was a reasonably solid model. Here are the top 10:

1. Finland
2. Norway
3. Switzerland
4. Canada
5. Japan
6. Sweden
7. Denmark
8. Netherlands
9. New Zealand
10. Belgium

That’s right: The United States did not make the top 10. It came in at 17th. If you live and or work in the States, you probably have heard about the importance of increasing student participation in STEM: Science,…

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