What This Book Offers

After reading this book, you will be better able to identify, recruit, and retain job candidates with unique sets of skills needed to support organizational objectives. You will further be able to develop your own leadership skills and advance in your career because you will learn what constitutes employable talent and how to help that talent recognize their own genius and the specific contributive value they have to offer your organization.

You will gain a thorough understanding of the four pillars of employable talent: resilience, balance, strategic career planning, and active financial planning. You will also come to know the unique contributions, skills, predispositions, and expectations of the current workplace generations.

Finally, you will gain a broad understanding of the new employment contract between employers and today’s employable talent and how the new contract differs from the old contract. You will see how to meet the challenges and take advantage of the opportunities as a result of the dramatic shifts in today’s workplace.

Navigating This Book

The Four Pillars of Employable Talent consists of 15 chapters, divided into three parts. Each chapter concludes with Insights and Lessons Learned, offering 5 to 6 thought-provoking observations or tips. It’s worth noting that all my recommendations for identifying and retaining employable talent and for helping them to perform at their best also applies to your own career!

Part I: The Whole Game Has Changed

Part I, consisting of 5 chapters, provides an overview, establishes definitions, and lays out the book’s framework.

Chapter 1: The World of Work

Chapter 2: The New Employment Contract

Chapter 3: Identifying Employable Talent

Chapter 4: The Era of the Versatilist

Chapter 5: Generational Personalities

Part II: Pillars of Employability

Part II, consisting of 6 chapters, describes The Four Pillars of Employable Talent.

Chapters 6 and 7 are devoted to Resilience

Chapter 8 focuses on Balance

Chapters 9 and 10 cover Strategic Career Planning and the SWOT Analysis

Chapter 11 discusses Financial Planning

Part III: Workforce Generations

Part III, consisting of 4 chapters, explores the current workforce generations.

Chapter 12: Seniors, who have the least amount of time left in the workforce

Chapter 13: Baby Boomers

Chapter 14: Generation X

Chapter 15: Millennials, the multi-millions of young workers entering and reshaping the workforce now.

Introduction

“I’d rather have a lot of talent and a little experience than a lot of experience and a little talent.”
—John Wooden”¨UCLA head coach and”¨member of the NBA Hall of Fame

I write this book for anyone who has a vested interest in understanding the new tenets that must be considered in recruiting for success. This includes readers who have the responsibility for talent management. You may have the title of Talent Manager or Chief Talent Officer. You may have a broader role in Human Resources but be charged with talent- management responsibilities. You may be in a senior management position—Chief Executive Officer, President, Senior Vice President, Vice President, Director, or any other title—which you use to champion talent-management principles to the leadership team.

You may be an entrepreneur who has built a successful organization only because you instinctively understood the advantages of paying attention to the talent of the employees you brought on board. You may be a mentor to new employees or a parent trying to guide a child.

Whoever you are, I speak to you as someone who has done— and continues to do—what you do when it comes to employable talent. I have had a variety of roles that have taught me the importance of talent management: Director of Planning and Analysis, Director of Human Resource Development, company founder, and academic scholar.

Whatever your situation, whether you are within a large organization or a small work team, you know you have to get a job done with the workforce as it exists. The workforce as it exists today is crowded, varied, and unevenly talented. No characteristic of today’s workforce is more important than this: It is multi-generational. No characteristic is more challenging. And little in the training, practice, or world view of company or agency HR managers, corporate officers, or entrepreneurs running their own ventures has prepared them for the challenge of recruiting and managing talent from so many and so different generations. Yet meeting this challenge is critical to an organization’s success.

Why is a book about addressing this challenge needed? And why is it needed now? The answer is rooted in two other employment trends that have shifted dramatically in recent years and intensified the impact of a multi-generational workforce.

First, companies, organizations, and institutions offer many fewer opportunities today for individuals with education and skill, and they are accomplishing more with fewer people. HR officers and all others with the daily responsibility for identifying, attracting, recruiting, and retaining employable talent are under more pressure to make the right hire and make it the first time. There are harder choices to make among applicants and no place to hide the choices that don’t work out.

The corporate ladder of yesteryears served as a way to grow talent over time and offered places to warehouse the hires who proved unable to work themselves up. Since the 1990s, this age-old structure has steadily yielded to one less populous and flatter—one with lateral rather than vertical paths. It has yielded to what some call the “jungle gym” model. This change has impacted the organization’s obligation to its employees, shifting from “we’ll take care of you and your career” to “we have a responsibility to help keep you employable.”

Second, the new reality of flatter organizations implies a shared contract. No longer does an employer owe an employee a job in exchange for hard work and loyalty. No longer are employees entitled to jobs simply because they have done nothing to lose them. Employers are obligated to help employees maintain viability in the workplace as long as the relationship is mutually fruitful. To create a win/win situation, employer and employee must share the responsibility for maintaining employability.

The overriding mission for entrepreneurs, talent managers, and HR managers is bringing into the organization employable talent who have the skills and awareness to succeed today and gain the trust and respect of others in tomorrow’s ever-changing environment. While organizations do not need to take responsibility for anyone’s long-term employment or career trajectory, they can help key staff exercise their talents for the organization in the short term and stay employable for the long term.

The corporate structure of the last half of the 20th century assumed it would perpetuate itself, outliving any one individual. People liked to believe in the permanence of the erstwhile corporation that would, in turn, recognize and reward each employee for his or her useful talents, abilities, and loyalty.

Most people seek domestic bliss, a healthy set of talents, lifelong friends, and unending good health. We want change, if it is to come at all, to arrive in bite-sized, even, countable doses. Many of us currently managing talent for organizations grew up in a world with this mind-set and have watched change arrive in the past four decades, not in digestible small bits but in large, uncomfortable chunks. Individuals are now more likely to outlive the organization.

Those of us managing talent today have similar stories to tell about how we got to this point. Here is mine. After finishing college, I landed a job with a large corporation. In the early years of my career, I moved up the ranks nicely. I got married, started a family, and was blessed in many ways. On my 10th wedding anniversary, I was informed that the position to which I had recently been promoted would now be eliminated. My supervisor told me, “It’s no reflection on your job performance, David. It’s just that market conditions demand that we downsize.”

Little did I know that my experience—which I found personally devastating—would play out over and over again for great masses of workers, as cataclysmic shifts in business and industry due to technology, coupled with demographic shifts in society and huge economic changes due to globalization, would continue to reshape our world.

Being downsized turned out to be more than just a hiccup in my career. It actually set me on a journey that ultimately led to this book. Assisting organizations and individuals in dealing with transition became my career. I took a position with a major corporation directing Human Resource Development. That work inspired me to launch my own company consulting on various talent-management issues. This then inspired me to undertake a doctoral program and pursue formal research on the topic of successful career transition. The research culminated in my dissertation, which became the foundation for this book.

Seeking to apply what I have learned throughout my career, I currently serve as chair of the Northern Virginia Workforce Investment Board, a joint state and federal project that helps workers ready themselves for new employment opportunities.

There was one other profound shift that, in retrospect, we all should have seen coming because it is as natural as eating and sleeping: Our children grew up, and then their children grew up. As each generation comes of age, significant and irreversible change is inevitable. Every generation is profoundly shaped by its parents’ generation. At the same time, each attempts to work and live in different ways— sometimes because of changing environmental circumstances or technological and social developments. Other times, they change just for the sake of change. One observation is clear: Few things remain the same from generation to generation.

My entry into the business world came at the time when “Seniors,” those born between 1920 and 1945, had settled into leadership positions. All the values, work ethics, and standard operating procedures I had learned so well were constructed by Seniors. I then watched as “Baby Boomers,” “Generation Xers,” and “Millennials” each entered the workforce.

Seniors are, understandably, a shrinking group. Many have reached or are about to reach retirement age. Some will pass away before retiring. The Baby Boomers are a primary focus of this book because of their large numbers, the long time before many will retire, and the variety of challenges they face, especially in managing or working with younger generations of technologically skilled talent. Gen Xers and especially Millennials will increasingly populate the ranks of any organization and fundamentally change it in ways you might not anticipate. In that regard, this book will be of great help.

Like the Seniors generation, these younger generations have their own version of the American dream. This dream includes pursuing a career that provides material and psychological rewards and requires managing one’s career effectively despite the inevitable hazards of a changing economy. As HR and talent-management professionals responsible for staffing our organizations, we need to understand with crystal clarity how to identify, attract, recruit, and support employable talent within the four generations so that everyone wins: ourselves, our organizations, and the talent we’ve attracted.

I hope that my book may also be of interest to more casual readers who are not talent managers. If you are a scholar of, or commentator upon, current business practices, you should find that several of my topics will pique your interest. If you are an educator preparing students for the “real world,” you can find in this book insights about the evolving state of the American workplace. If you aspire to lead a company or agency, you will find within these pages some valuable suggestions. And if you are a young professional who considers himself or herself a notch above the competition in training, skills, and critical thinking, you will find within this book an understanding of what talent managers are seeking.

Regardless of why you chose this book, it offers observations and insights, as well as lessons from my considerable experience and 40-plus years of formal research working with members of each generation. It explores the new paradigm in today’s workplace and provides insights that are both practical and actionable.

The book is organized in three parts that can be read sequentially or in whatever order most engages you. Talent managers ought to start with Part I, which discusses the conditions creating the new demand for employable talent. Mid-career professionals (or their mentors) might go directly to Part II, which lays out the Four Pillars in detail. The manager now dealing with four generations of employees in an organization will find that Part III provides insights about improving day-to-day interactions.