Strategic personnel development – goals and tips for 2024

Strategic Human Resource Development: A Necessity in the Dynamic Work Environment

Strategic human resource development is crucial for the competitiveness and long-term success of a company—especially in our current world influenced by skills shortages. In this article, you will learn how to effectively design and implement strategic human resource development in your company to not only achieve your business goals but also secure a significant competitive advantage over your peers.

Definition: What is meant by strategic human resource development?

Strategic human resource development encompasses the deliberate and systematic promotion and development of the skills and competencies of your employees within the company, derived from the company's strategy and objectives. This approach aims to ensure that exactly the right skills are cultivated within the company, which are necessary to achieve the company's short-term and long-term goals.

Goals of strategic human resource development

The goals of strategic human resource development are diverse and support the overall personnel strategy of the company. They concern both the overall company level and the work of various teams in the personnel department, especially in human resource development. The following goals are focused on:

• Developing skills to achieve the corporate strategy: Measures in strategic human resource development should empower employees to directly contribute to the implementation of the corporate strategy. For this, strategic human resource development needs to derive the required skills from the company's objectives—ideally in collaboration with the relevant departments.
• Increasing employee motivation and retention: Especially in times of skills shortages, retaining key employees and their skills is a major priority. A positive work atmosphere and individual development opportunities have been shown to increase work motivation and loyalty, thus improving retention within the company.
• Focusing on talent development: Given the skills shortages, it is essential to develop talent internally to meet future needs, as the market increasingly competes for the same talent pool. This approach can also help reduce costs associated with new hires.
• Increasing customer-centricity: Especially in economically challenging times, working with a customer-centric approach is more important than ever to retain long-term customers and generate additional revenues. Employees should be empowered to effectively identify customer needs and develop innovative solutions to increase customer satisfaction.
• Enhancing the attractiveness of the employer brand: A strong corporate culture and attractive career opportunities ensure long-term access to talented employees.
• Securing competitiveness: By identifying trends and new required skills early, the company remains competitive and can react promptly to necessary future skills.

Steps in strategic human resource development

The implementation of successful strategic human resource development requires careful planning and execution of various measures:

1. Goal definition: Your target image should be clearly defined and aligned with the corporate vision and strategy, considering both short-term and long-term perspectives.
2. Personnel needs analysis: A precise and ongoing analysis of personnel needs helps determine the current and future demand for skilled workers and plan accordingly. Ideally, needs are not only determined in full-time equivalents but also broken down directly into skills to recognize skill needs early.
3. Identifying future skills: To define your target state of skills and competencies, you need to first identify which skills will become relevant to your business. It is advisable to develop these requirements in collaboration with various departments.
4. Identification of competency gaps and skill gaps: Through skill gap analysis, you can determine where further training or new hires are particularly necessary. This requires the development of your skill and competency catalog as well as your target profiles.
5. Development of a personnel development plan: Derive measures to close skill and competency gaps and expand your training catalog accordingly. In this context, it may be useful to expand the mix of training with e-learning.

Practical tips for successful strategic human resource development

Especially the start of strategic human resource development can be challenging for many teams. It is important here to minimize the time spent on operational, recurring tasks so that enough time is available for strategic work.

• Involving leadership: Ensure that company management and leadership understand the importance of personnel development and actively support it. This also means that leaders regularly emphasize employee development within development discussions and allocate sufficient time for employee training within the company.
• Holistic approach: Integrate personnel development into a comprehensive company concept and involve your departments and business partners. Strategic human resource development should be seen as support for the department to expand important skills and competencies that contribute to achieving corporate goals.
• Evaluation of measures: Regularly review the effectiveness of training measures and adjust them accordingly. Measure effectiveness, test new training formats, and expand the training portfolio. Especially e-learning can be a very time-efficient measure to close skill gaps in the short term.
• Consideration of employee needs: Do not only consider the top-down specified skill needs but also regularly take into account the wishes and needs of your employees. Companies that want to strategically position themselves successfully within personnel development should continuously and regularly evaluate learning needs among employees and demonstrate that employees are being heard.

Conclusion

Strategic human resource development is more than just an HR function; it is a critical factor for the success of your company. Through targeted planning and implementation, it can not only increase employee satisfaction but also make the company future-proof. Use strategic human resource development to optimally prepare your company for the challenges and opportunities of the modern work environment.

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