Bridging the gap between VET and business: Modern talent management and analytics 4.0 for SMEs in Europe

The most valuable assets for sustainable business success in these volatile days are people. But not just any people: Motivated, high performing people, their skills and knowledge, their creative potential and their openness to learn and grow.Talent Management 4.0 seems to be the most promising approach for organisations to attract and maintain these key people and talents to better deal with a fast-changing VUCA-world and global developments like the Covid-19 pandemic, demographic and climate change, digitisation, automation, and globalisation.The Talent 4.0 project aimed to develop different resources and outputs to enable Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to apply modern Talent Management and analytics in their business strategy and HR practice. Furthermore it wanted to draw a strong contribution to bridge the gap between current VET practices and business needs in this field.To implement this ambitious project Talent 4.0 brought together a strong international partnership of 7 different organisations from 7 European countries. The project partnership consisted of social partner institutions, training centres, SME networks and technology research organisations from AT, DE, ES, IT, IE, CY and SE.The core target group of our activities and also of the intellectual outputs were SMEs that are confronted with the need to properly implement talent management processes and tools to better deal with the VUCA world and changing HR demands. Furthermore we addressed VET Centres and Trainers that provide training programmes in HR and talent management. An overall of approximately 900 SMEs and 90 VET Trainers or VET Centre responsible persons were involved during the implementation of the project.The Talent 4.0 project implemented three main activities and produced three main results to support SMEs to build Talent Management 4.0 knowledge, skills and competencies to bridge the gap between the VET system and the business world.(1) Talent 4.0 Research ReportA study on current talent management practices and needs of SMEs in the 7 Talent 4.0 partner countries was carried out to find out about SME needs and inform the further design of the other two products, the toolbox and training programme.A total number of 331 SMEs took part in the survey. An overall report and an executive summary, translated into all 6 partner languages, was produced. (2) Talent 4.0 ToolboxTalent 4.0 has developed a toolbox featuring a selection of useful and practical resources catered explicitly for the needs as a small and medium sized company that SMEs, consultants, education & HR professionals and experts, can easily benefit from. The toolbox was developed as document version as well as in web format. Both versions were translated into all 6 partner languages.(3) Talent 4.0 Training ProgrammeThe Talent 4.0 project partnership developed a 5-day modular training programme (1.5 ECVET Credits) with accompanying resources targeted to support SMEs on their journey to set up their own talent management system. The training programme consists of a curriculum document, five interconnected modules:Check-in to Talent Management for Industry 4.0 (M01)Attract – How to find best-fit and attract the right people (M02)Develop - Identify and Build-Up the talents of your team (M03)Motivate – Establishing a high performance culture (M04)Retain – Offering prospects for lasting commitment (M05)Every module contains theoretical input as well as practical elements and exercises with a special focus to web 4.0 tools and platforms. We developed a web version with introductory videos and guiding infos. All materials are available in all 6 partner languages.Despite the covid-19 restrictions the partnership tested and trained 21 VET trainers and HR experts during a unique online training event in June 2020. Feedback received led to further improvements of the materials and the experiences of a virtual event helped to further implement national pilots. National pilot courses were implemented as unique online training events testing all developed learning materials in totally different organisational and national pandemic situations with around 130 participants from 7 countries. The partnership also achieved the following further important objectives:1. We developed the project website https://t4lent.eu and an online community of practice on social media via the project's facebook page https://www.facebook.com/t4lent.eu with more than 400 subscribers from all over Europe.2.Despite the pandemic restrictions we were able to implement the very successful online conference “Talent Management 4.0 in times of pandemic” with over 60 participants from 7 EU countries. We will disseminate and exploit the project and its results after the end of the project lifetime with a Stand at the Euroskills 2020 event in September 2021 in Graz, AT, a permanent Talent Management Training offer at the WIFI Steiermark and the follow-up project Talent4LIFE.