Great Read on High Potential Employees- Why You Need Them to Stay

Retaining High Potentials

by Norman Schippers (Talent Management Magazine)

According to a recent study by the Society for Human Resource Management, 12 percent of the workforce, on average, voluntarily resigned January through August 2006.

More-current statistics do not look any more promising — a February 2007 survey by Salary.com revealed that nearly 66 percent of tenured employees (people who have been in their positions for three to 10 years) plan to look for a new job in the next three months.

The threat of increased turnover is grabbing the attention of management, as well as human resources. The productivity costs of losing 12 percent of your workforce is certainly enough for companies to take action, but when combined with the financial and market impact, addressing retention issues quickly escalates to the top of upper management's priority list.

Studies show employee turnover can cost companies up to 40 percent of their annual profit. That's for the turnover of all employees, regardless of their performance levels. The financial impact of losing a significant number of high- potential employees (those who have been identified as your future leaders) can be exponentially higher.

to access the complete article online, go to :

http://www.talentmgt.com/succession_planning/2007/August/394/index.php

How Does a Best Practice become Better?

The notion of a best practice is not new. Frederick Taylor (1919)^[1] said as much nearly 100 years ago: “among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest”. This viewpoint came to be known as the "one best way" (Kanigel, 1997)^[2].

History, however, is filled with examples of people who were unwilling to accept the industry standard as the best way to do anything. The enormous technological changes since the Industrial Revolutions in England and the United States bear witness to this fact. For example, at one time horses were considered the 'best' form of transportation, even after 'horse-less carriages' were invented. Today, most people drive a gasoline, diesel, or bio-fuel vehicle—itself an improvement on the horse-less carriage.

In real-world application, Best Practice is a very useful concept. Despite the need to improve on processes as times change and things evolve, Best Practice is considered by some as a business buzzword used to describe the process of developing and following a standard way of doing things that multiple organizations can use for management, policy, and especially software systems.

Best Practices are commonly used in many Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Marketing Operations Management (MOM) systems. A Best Practice can be selected (generally from several competing options) and defined within a computer system. Then, any organization performing similar tasks can draw from the same procedure, and theoretically improve their operations.

Human Resources is one example of Best Practices as implemented in MOM systems. There are numerous standard procedures defined when managing an organisation's employees, volunteers, and contractors. By choosing a "Best Practice" or standard way of organizing and performing processes, the makers of MOM systems or Human Resource Management (HRM) system software are able to produce systems that can be used by multiple organisations.

Because such systems are restrictive by nature, implementing Best Practices by using such software may force organizations who have less formally defined procedures to conform to a single standard. Deviation from this standard may require a change to the software. Avoiding these related costs may be a motivating factor in choosing to conform.

Newly discovered Best Practices and changing industry standards often heavily influence ERP/MOM/HRM system design. Recent pressures on companies to change quickly in emerging global marketplaces have forced many vendors to be more flexible in how Best Practices are defined and implemented

Remember, today's Best practices continually evolve

Where did the Likert Scale come from?

The American educator and organizational psychologist Rensis Likert (pronounced 'Lick-urt') (1903–1981) is best known for his research on management styles.

He developed Likert Scales and the Linking pin model.

A Likert scale (pronounced 'lick-urt') is a type of psychometric response scale often used in questionnaires, and is the most widely used scale in survey research. When responding to a Likert questionnaire item, respondents specify their level of agreement to a statement. The scale is named after Rensis Likert, who published a report describing its use (Likert, 1932).

Sample Question presented using a five-point Likert Scale

A typical test item in a Likert scale is a statement. The respondent is asked to indicate his or her degree of agreement with the statement or any kind of subjective or objective evaluation of the statement. Traditionally a five-point scale is used, however many psychometricians advocate using a seven or nine point scale.

Ice cream is good for breakfast

1. Strongly disagree
2. Disagree
3. Neither agree nor disagree
4. Agree
5. Strongly agree

Likert scaling is a bipolar scaling method, measuring either positive or negative response to a statement. Sometimes a four-point scale is used; this is a forced choice method since the middle option of "Neither agree nor disagree" is not available. Likert scales may be subject to distortion from several causes. Respondents may avoid using extreme response categories (central tendency bias); agree with statements as presented (acquiescence bias); or try to portray themselves or their organization in a more favorable light (social desirability bias).

Why is web 2.0 different?

Although the term suggests a new version of the World Wide Web, it does not refer to an update to Web technical specifications, but to changes in the ways software developers and end-users use the web as a platform. According to Tim O'Reilly, "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform, and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform."

Check out this video on YouTube that shows you which sites utilize web 2.0 capabilities at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsa5ZTRJQ5w

Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O'Reilly Media in 2003^[1] and popularized by the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004^[2] , refers to a perceived second generation of web-based communities and hosted services — such as social-networking sites, wikis and folksonomies — which facilitate collaboration and sharing between users. O'Reilly Media titled a series of conferences around the phrase, and it has since become widely adopted.

Who is Donald Kirkpatrick and why are there 4 levels?

Donald Kirkpatrick is known for creating the training evaluation model. This model consists of four levels of learning evaluation. Kirkpatrick's ideas were first published in 1959, in a series of articles in the US Training and Development Journal.

The four levels of Kirkpatrick's evaluation model essentially measure:

• reaction of student - what they thought and felt about the training
• learning - the resulting increase in knowledge or capability
• behaviour - extent of behaviour and capability improvement and implementation/application
• results - the effects on the business or environment resulting from the trainee's performance

For more on Kirkpatrick's Four Levels of Evaluation, see this wiki

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Kirkpatrick

What does SCORM really mean?

SCORM is a word (an acronym really) used extensively in the education and learning world to describe an online course that has been packaged up for transportation to other learning systems. It's knd of like an email sent from Lotus being received in an outlook box, while it travels through the Internet it is packaged up so as to not be disturbed. Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) is a collection of standards and specifications for web-based e-learning.

For more nonsense of this acronym, visit this wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scorm

Where did the term "Talent Management" come from?

This term is usually associated with competency-based human resource management practices. Talent management decisions are often driven by a set of organizational core competencies as well as position-specific competencies. The competency set may include knowledge, skills, experience, and personal traits (demonstrated through defined behaviors).

Older competency models might also contain attributes that rarely predict success (e.g. education, tenure, and diversity factors that are illegal to consider in many countries).

In the late 1990s, technology companies engaged in a 'war for talent'.

The term was coined by McKinsey & Company following a 1997 study and then it was the title of a book by Ed Michaels, Helen Handfield-Jones, and Beth Axelrod.

McKinsey and Co first coined the term...read this wiki http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talent_management