As a talent manager, you want talented people to bring fresh energy and make the culture more contemporary. You also want them to progress into key positions within the organisation. A lot of attention therefore goes to recruitment, onboarding and the assignments talents will carry out in the workplace. Deciding that training should be part of the programme rarely takes many meetings. Of course you want to give talents several skills to help them make a success of their first years at work. But how do you create a well-structured, engaging and results-oriented training offer? That is what we explain in this article.
Avoid altitude sickness
First, an important tip about building your talent programme: do not start too quickly with highly personal development training. Especially with starting trainees, this is a common pitfall. Management thinker Marcus Buckingham introduced the term “altitude sickness” several years ago. In his bestseller First, Break All the Rules, he describes how managers sometimes focus on the wrong needs when managing employees, even with the best intentions. They start by focusing on personal development and talent-oriented working. Wonderful things in themselves. But, Buckingham argues, it is absolutely essential first to make clear what is expected of employees and to give them the resources and tools to actually do the work. If that clarity is missing, while the manager does give personal attention, Buckingham calls this altitude sickness. For a mountaineer, altitude sickness means descending to base camp as quickly as possible. Exactly the same dynamic can arise in a talent programme.
The solution is timing. Millennials need more time to understand exactly what their task in the workplace is and how to perform it well. In the first phase, that requires all the attention. Otherwise the return on your expensive personal development training disappears. In short: design your programme so that talents first get the chance to really land in the workplace.
Urgency, fun and depth
Once the structure of your talent programme is right, how do you ensure the training moments really matter? How do you make sure participants return from an off-site full of energy and actually apply what they have learned? In our view, every training moment should contain an element of urgency, fun and depth. These concepts help you evaluate the content of training for Millennials.
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Urgency
It is important that participants feel a strong connection between the content of the training and the obstacles or ambitions they encounter in the workplace. Too many training sessions start with a model, colour test or “fun exercise”. That may be interesting, but it often connects too little with the questions talents actually have. As a talent manager, you need to answer the following questions: how are current, urgent issues addressed before and during training days? Are there quick and contemporary ways at the end of the programme to create a link back to the workplace?
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Fun
Trainers and coaches sometimes have a tendency to make sessions too serious. But training can absolutely be enjoyable and energetic. Approach it a little less like clinical group therapy and see your talents a little more as a group of energetic young dogs. At the same time, it is not about serving trainees with a consumer mindset of “entertain me, trainer, or I will switch off”. Many serious topics can be addressed in an energetic, experiential way. For example, by organising a challenging boot camp in the woods or a workshop in writing life songs. A setting that is too serious and static does not help young talents reflect on themselves.
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Depth
Alongside urgency and fun, a programme only becomes valuable when there are moments of real depth. Depth in personal development emerges when “obvious truths” are questioned. Which ingrained, unconscious patterns do you recognise? How do they help you at work? Where do they hold you back? A simple example: many Millennials ask for tools to work more productively and get more done, such as planning tools and online logs. A valid question, but what if being productive and goal-oriented is actually a way of avoiding more difficult conversations? Then the real learning lies elsewhere. Good training helps participants discover those deeper layers and translate them into practical behaviour.
Training is therefore not a simple add-on to a talent programme. The timing, structure and content matter. If you create a programme that helps talents first land in their work and then work with urgency, energy and depth, training becomes a powerful accelerator of growth.