There are several key facets to talent management, namely, recruiting and onboarding to assist organizations in acquiring and socializing appropriate personnel, reward and performance management to steer personnel in their careers and learning to provide employees with the skills they require for success. Learning business process outsourcing (BPO) can facilitate the timely and cost-effective provision of learning within organizations.

The scope of learning services covers four main pillars:

• Content development and management
• Learning delivery
• Learning tools and platforms
• Learning administration

Over the past year, there has been a marked change in attitudes toward HR, with talent management issues increasingly dominating concerns about cost reduction and service standardization — now, there’s interest in HR’s impact on organizational goals, not just with its transactional cost-effectiveness.

Learning is affected in the same way. The increasing war for talent means that “time to competency” needs to be cut as staff turnover increases, and an aging workforce increases the importance of effective knowledge capture and transfer.

Rapid growth in emerging economies also means the global workforce needs to be trained quickly, effectively and consistently. Learning also needs to be used as a means of rewarding employees and reducing turnover.

Thus, the demand for and importance of training within the organization are increasing, and increasing amounts of money are being spent on it. Organizations need to optimize this spending for organizational impact and not just throw more cash at learning.

At the same time, approaches to learning are changing. Advances in learning technology have created some interesting challenges in terms of which approach to employ in which situation, how to combine different types of learning delivery within a single learning program and even the suitability of different learning delivery channels for differing employee profiles.

Another issue is persuading employees to train, which has implications for learning design. It also can involve restructuring of training into more bite-sized elements.