IMPACT 2011 Wrapup – Watch the Keynotes

We just finished a thrilling week in Florida at IMPACT 2011: The Business of Talent®, our annual research conference. I sincerely hope that the 450 of you who joined us had as much fun as I did. This year we sold out a month early, and the energy was higher than ever.  For those of you who could not make it, we will keep the links to replay the keynotes up for a few weeks.  (Attendees will get access to slides and all the video replays.)

A few thoughts on the conference.

First, it is very clear to me, and my keynote highlights this trend, that today’s business environment is driving HR and all areas of talent management to work more closely together than ever before. If you listen to Lori Sweere’s keynote on the transformation at United Health Group, you will see the value of integrating talent acquisition, development, and mobility into an integrated organization.

In many ways, this is the next shoe to drop in Human Resources. Over the last ten years we have all been focused on creating a federated model for L&D and building an integrated approach to talent management. As our research clearly shows, the next “big thing” is to integrate these strategies with your talent acquisition and mobility strategy. Stacey Harris’s new High-Impact HR Framework (which was launched at the conference) will help you understand this.

Second, I feel like we all just “woke up” in a borderless workplace. As I discussed in my keynote, nearly every business we talk with is now trying to globalize.  Not only does this force us to change the way we develop leaders and the way we manage people, it dramatically changes how we recruit and develop employees. Global English, one of our new solution provider partners, just launched research that shows that 70% of the employees in the top 1000 global businesses are not native english speakers.  And among these important people, only 7% feel fully fluent in english.  Watch for a lot more on this topic from us in the coming months.

Third, I cannot stress importantly enough how important it now is for us as HR and L&D professionals, to reskill and “upgrade” our own knowledge of the world around us.  Our new research on global HR skills shows that our profession is being asked to take on ever-increasing challenges, yet is underskilled in areas like social networking, change management, performance consulting, organizational culture, and the fundamentals of talent management.  The US Department of Labor expects HR-related jobs to grow at twice the rate of other jobs in the economy – and this means that your skills and capabilities will be in greater demand than ever.  (We are now previewing our new professional development offerings to help you meet these demands, so contact us if you are interested.)

We look to sharing much more with you on these trends in the coming weeks.  Sign up now for IMPACT 2012, there is a $100 early bird discount.  Mark your calendar – April 10-12, 2012 – bring your whole team!