The future of work and workforce is very different from what it has been all these years. Going by the key trends shaping up over the last few months, digital, virtual, remote, on-demand, cost-optimisation, employee engagement, agile and life-long learning are a few buzz words difficult to ignore, even when it comes to planning the work, as well as the workforce strategy, for most of the organisations right from the global fortune enterprises to startups.

Every business is undergoing a rapid change and the business models are shifting fast. And with the people at the centre of every business, here are the three key elements that form an essential part of the talent strategy impacting the future of work:

1. How do organisations enable an environment and culture of life-long learning for their employees?

2. How do organisations keep their employees highly engaged so as to improve employee productivity as well as retention, leading to capability building and cost-optimisation?

3. How do organisations harness the talent and skill-sets available within, without having to worry about the physical barriers or borders, as well as the actual role the talent was hired for?

This is where developing and implementing an internal talent marketplace model can be highly effective and therefore can be utilised to promote talent mobility. So, what is a ‘talent marketplace’ after all. Simply put, a talent marketplace is the term that refers to a technology-enabled platform that helps to match the demand for talent (or skills) with its supply (within or outside the organisation) using advanced technology and match-making algorithms.

When implemented internally within the confines of an organisation’s talent landscape, it (talent marketplace) is called an internal talent marketplace that provides a digital footprint and data of all the available job roles, tasks, projects, gigs or short-term assignments, project-based skill requirements posted by various hiring managers on the demand side and the data on the actual skill-sets of the talent available within the organisation irrespective of the physical location of that talent, on the supply side; and these being matched with each other by using technology and smart algorithms, helping the organisation, as well as the employees, benefiting from this.

The hiring managers get access to the required skill-sets and talent fast and the employees also get an opportunity to utilise and develop their skills as well as aspirations they are passionate about, resulting into much higher levels of engagement, overall productivity and growth opportunities for career progression within the organisation, purely on the basis of their talent merit, fostering long-term relationships and much better employee retention as they do not always have to look outside the organisation for opportunities of growth.

This is what makes an internal talent marketplace a classic business case to promote talent mobility for the employers and the future of work. However, getting a real breakthrough with this is not as simple as it appears, for a simple fact that most of the traditional workplaces and practices are centred around the mentality of hoarding talent.

It is observed that in most of the organisations, team managers have a typical mindset of hoarding and controlling the talent in their teams and are highly insecure about sharing that talent or allowing their team members to freely approach and benefit from such opportunities of internal mobility. It is a mindset and organisation culture issue, more than anything else.

They (team managers) feel if they allow their talented team members to showcase and cross-leverage their skills for assignments outside of their team or project they may end up losing that talent for good but they do not realise that over 63% of the talented individuals leave the organisation looking for new learnings and better career prospects outside the organisation, mostly when they find themselves stuck or not growing any more within the organisation.

The author, Karunjit Kumar Dhir, is Co-Founder of SCIKEY.