Michael Dorsey ensures that every Department of Human Services employee has the training they need to serve Maryland residents. When Maryland residents experience a crisis, they can turn to the Department of Human Services, the state’s primary social service provider, for help and guidance. DHS assists more than 1 million people annually, although that number is likely to rise in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The department, through its 24 local administrations—covering areas such as child protective services, supplemental food assistance, and other...

Chief People Officer Marissa Andrada is leading cultural transformation at Chipotle. From sustainably sourced, real ingredients to hand-prepared foods to forming partnerships with farmers to offering employees no-cost mental healthcare and debt-free college degrees, Chipotle is on a mission to cultivate a better world. The fast-casual restaurant infuses this mission in everything it does, and that is a driving element of its talent development initiatives. "It really does capture what we stand for, which is this whole food culture and movement that Steve Ells,...

What will 2020 look like for talent development leaders? Do they anticipate being able to meet their organizations' needs, to have an impact on corporate performance? How do they expect other leaders' views of talent development to change? How many resources do they think they'll have at their disposal? To answer those questions, in December 2019, the Association for Talent Development conducted an online poll of 116 talent development leaders. ATD distributes this Talent Development Executive Confidence Index (TDXCI) survey every quarter, using participants'...

Don't tap tech just because it's new—identify the need and build a case for it. When implementing new learning technology such as learning experience portals, gamification apps, microlearning platforms, artificial intelligence–driven and machine learning–driven guided support tools, inner mobility platforms, and virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), you may find yourself with a learning technology but looking for a problem to solve rather than with a technology solution that's addressing a real business need. Too often well-meaning stakeholders ask...

Scenario planning and talent forecasting can help talent development professionals brace—and prepare—for future disruption. Learning and talent development budgets have grown rapidly during the robust bull market of the past 11 years. As a result, some talent development professionals haven't needed to pay attention to deep profit and loss analysis for our units. While the TD function has often been viewed as a cost center, the 2010s saw it emerge as a critical driver of recruiting, employee engagement, brand building, and growth. Yet, the COVID-19 pandemic—and...

Chief Learning Officer Michael Molinaro is ensuring New York Life employees have easy access to intuitive learning options. Leadership isn't a role you inhabit—it's a set of actions. That principle has been a driving force behind the work of Michael Molinaro, chief learning officer for New York Life, the largest mutual life insurance company in the United States, according to Fortune. "People are leaders when they act in a leaderly way," says Molinaro. "We've worked to define the leadership actions that most embody who we are and what we want to be at New York...

Taking shortcuts will lead to unproductive and likely costly outcomes. When you cheat, you know better. When I was a talent development manager at a public accounting firm, I administered the most disastrous learning event of my career. If I’m truly honest, it was because I cheated. What’s worse, I blamed my supervisor, and she took the hit. What happened in that two-hour session awoke both my integrity and my commitment to the talent development discipline. I was preparing for the annual weeklong audit managers’ continuing education program. One of the new...

Follow these seven steps to effect change. My mandate was to build a leadership pipeline. While I was already familiar with leadership competencies when I joined TELUS International, I didn't know much about the company or why it needed a pipeline and didn't already have one. What were its business objectives and goals? How does it make money? How was the organization structured? How would L&D help the firm achieve its business objectives? What impact would multiple cultures have on a global learning strategy? How would we measure success? I took two years to...

Liz Janssen is focused on ensuring ICF employees have the skills and mentoring to support the company's innovation and growth. In 1969, a former Tuskegee Airman and three U.S. Department of Defense analysts founded the Inner City Fund to finance minority-owned businesses in Washington, D.C. Fifty years later, ICF has become a billion-dollar global consulting and digital services firm focused on solving complex problems for their clients in various industries such as energy, environment, public health, economic development, and more. With client partners and...

Director of Talent Management Mary McNevin helps U.S. Venture prepare future leaders while broadening its talent acquisition scope. Talent development skills are portable across industries—and Mary McNevin’s career is a testament to this. She’s developed talent for a healthcare company, a food manufacturer, and now U.S. Venture, an energy, automotive, and lubricant products company. The learners in her current universe range from CEOs to barge captains, forklift drivers, and oil traders. As director of talent management, McNevin oversees talent acquisition,...

In some organizations, it is becoming tougher to manage people—regardless of whether they are employees or contract workers. As more and more high-level, independent workers are staffed on projects, hiring managers are learning that they must follow new rules to manage these gig workers, rules that may not seem intuitive and may even seem harsh. Consider the recent kerfuffle at Google. In December 2018, The Guardian published the rules Google had adopted for managing its “two-tiered” workforce. The exposé cited in detail the specific practices this large, global...

Peruse articles about talent development and you'll find that many focus on the war for talent, engagement drivers, and the future of work. Talent development is often thought of as a strategic function, but serving whom? Given today's workforce and challenges, the time to advance our leadership and make a greater impact is now. The days of talent development professionals being asked to exclusively focus on talent development is coming to an end, and it's something to be celebrated. For many companies, the boundary separating talent development and HR leaders in...

Succession planning is essential for ensuring business continuity and operations, but research shows that not many organizations actually have formal succession plans in place. In fact, the Association for Talent Development's latest research, Succession Planning: Ensuring Continued Excellence, found that just 35 percent of organizations have a formalized succession planning process. In April 2018, ATD Research surveyed 585 talent development professionals about their organizations' succession planning efforts—or lack thereof. This research served to identify...

Chief Talent Officer Michael Arena is helping build adaptability into General Motors' workforce. After more than 100 years as a tra- ditional automotive manufacturer,General Motors began to realize that it needed to make changes to remain a competitive force in the industry. Once the largest automotive manufacturer in the world, it was no longer making a profit as of 2005. And the 2008 global financial crisis—when car sales plunged—only increased its losses. With liabilities twice its assets in 2009, GM engaged in an ongoing process of improving the operating...

Get employees technologically up to speed through hiring, upskilling, and reskilling. Your organization's engineers and developers are certainly familiar with the latest technologies. But is the rest of your organization? Do your employees know how these tools relate to your organization's success? In today's digital economy, everyone must all be well versed in the technologies that are permeating every aspect of our work and personal lives. If digital collaboration isn't something you're required to do on a day-to-day basis, chances are it's heading your way...

Hilti stands on a leadership model of developing people and achieving outstanding results. Eivind Slaaen has an unusual commute to work—a 20—minute drive from a small village in the mountains of Maienfeld, Switzerland, to his office in neighboring Lichtenstein. He is the head of people and culture development for Hilti, a multinational company that develops, manufactures, and markets products, systems, software, and services that serve the construction and energy sectors. Slaaen, who has been with Hilti for almost 30 years in a variety of different roles, is...

Don't fear lost knowledge through employee departures—build a foundation of knowledge management to realize business goals. It's inevitable. People will leave an organization. It has happened before, and it will happen again. Sometimes they will take with them that thing that is so precious and hard to replace: the deep knowledge they have gained about how to create the results the company requires. And even though it has happened before, companies are afraid. Where is the root of this fear? Is it the notion that the knowledge is irreplaceable? Is it the sense...

Dave DeFilippo is fighting the war for talent in the construction industry. Dave DeFilippo had the perfect glide path to his job as chief people and learning officer at Suffolk: He began his career in talent development as a high school teacher and track coach. That was 25 years ago, but his passion for helping people improve their performance never waned. "If you can confidently run a six-minute mile, but you want to run a five-minute mile, how do you do that?" he likes to ask. His let's-make-a-good-thing-better approach fits well into the Suffolk culture of...

"In our culture, we don't pass along problems to someone else; we try to help however we can." Chief People and Learning Officer Suffolk As the chief people and learning officer at Suffolk, Dave DeFilippo leads all aspects of the construction management firm's human resource, talent, leadership, and organizational development strategy. We have a People and Culture approach, which is our human capital practice, to talent development that includes strategy, structure, systems and processes, and outcome. Our strategy is to enable Suffolk's growth and performance by...

Judy Jackson is creating a culture of conversation built around people. To understand Judy Jackson's job as global chief talent officer at the global digital agency Wunderman, you have to start with her boss, Mark Read. He was appointed CEO in 2015 after more than 20 years with Wunderman's parent company, the U.K. advertising and public relations giant, WPP Group. "I came back because of our global CEO, Mark Read," says Jackson, who was with Wunderman 15 years earlier as the HR leader for the New York office. "Mark is known for turning companies around. He came...