Held in Las Vegas from April 14 to 17, and across over 100 sessions, this year’s SHRM Talent Conference and Expo once again offered HR professionals the opportunity to hear from industry experts and peers on the key talent management issues of the moment. A number of PeopleFluent team members were in attendance—in this article, Katie Coleman reviews some of the key themes from the event that signal the challenges and concerns faced by workforce-focused professionals and organizations.

1) Yes, There Was a Lot of Discussion About AI

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that speakers and attendees had plenty to say about artificial intelligence. As many as 18 separate sessions enticed conference-goers in with promises of a discussion of AI in the title, and countless more inevitably touched on the technology as part of their examination of current issues. Whatever you wanted to hear about the potential of AI—or the risks it presented—in particular areas of HR practice, there was almost certainly a session purporting to help you better understand the current state of play.

Further establishing AI’s place in the agenda was Monday’s general attendance session “Crossroads for Talent, Smart Tech, and Learning”, kicking off the first full day of talks. This discussion involved an eclectic panel featuring well-known L&D analyst and Broadway producer Elliott Masie, corporate entertainer and trainer Lauren Ansley, and DJ Jeff Taylor of Soulful Sounds, Inc.

The panel emphasized that HR’s hardest challenge remains attracting talent that will thrive, grow, and stay, and that organizations must strive to get the right people, with the right skills, in the right roles, at the right time. Faced with the reality that skills are evolving faster than they ever have, AI was suggested as a potential solution, with its ability to optimize, automate, predict data, and personalize experiences.

A later talk, “Exploring the Opportunities of the New Learning Tech Landscape”, from David Kelly of the Learning Guild, asked attendees to consider how tech has changed the way we live in order to reveal how it may change the way we learn. Kelly cautioned the audience to avoid approaching new tech with the wrong questions, offering the example of organizations initially approaching mobile eLearning as “just another screen” rather than taking advantage of what a mobile device could do. Positing that “in a few years, an AI tool will be able to do about 20% of what you do today manually”, he asked HR professionals to consider what they would do with 20% more time.

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2) AI Is Far From the Only Technology You Need to Find a Place For

In common with many of the event’s talks, AI was only one of a range of subjects touched on in Kelly’s talk. AI is, after all, arriving in a “new learning tech landscape” that’s already relatively complex. A range of new and established learning platforms (LRSs, LXPs, and competency and skills management platforms) coexist and combine with the traditional LMS. This requires L&D teams to reconsider where their LMS sits in the ecosystem, and how each alternative system may be relevant for their organization.

AI may have stolen the spotlight in recent years, but the many other pieces of learning tech, and tech-enabled processes, are still a critical part of the picture. Kelly named the following:

• Microlearning: the ideal format for providing learning within the flow of work, it was suggested that some L&D departments sometimes overlook this specific use case and simply create shorter learning.
• Personalized Learning: Kelly was critical of “Netflix-style” learning personalization, suggesting it was “good but not great” and that the focus should instead be on personalization around competency rather than interest.
• The Metaverse: Kelly proposed that Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) are powerful tools that L&D should be paying more attention to. While VR’s usefulness for practice in life-and-death scenarios was highlighted, he suggested that “AR will be transformative once the devices get there and aren’t a distraction to the outside world.”

Finally, reflecting on all these options and a wider context of rising digital competency requirements, the talk encouraged attendees to be more agile, experimental, consultative, and to seek opportunities to be seen as leaders. It was also suggested that digital learning needs to be reframed—making it more about solving people’s learning questions.

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3) A Structured Approach to Talent Development Strategy Is Non-Optional

Methods for talent development—the systematic approach within organizations aimed at identifying, nurturing, and growing the knowledge, skills, and abilities that make employees successful—are always a hot topic of discussion at HR conferences like SHRM.

One talk from Josh Gottesman of Orthodox Union, “The Talent Common Denominator: How to Build a Talent Development Strategy the Lasts”, proposed an interesting approach. He focused on a concept called “The Talent Common Denominator”, which he defined as “a fundamental set of foundational and transferable skills”. By focusing on these universally relevant skills, it was suggested that individuals can accelerate their growth and “achieve success across multiple levels within the organization”. Furthermore, organizations that focus on imparting these common denominator skills can increase retention, engagement, and cost savings.

A specific structured approach was suggested to achieve this:

1. Building a skills inventory by identifying what makes your employees successful
2. Building your job architecture by, rather than just relying on your org chart, taking into account five levels of impact within your organization:
   1. Leading self (employees concerned with the skills required to carry out their jobs)
   2. Leading others (employees with influence over their peers and teams as a whole)
   3. Leading teams (employees with formal team leadership or supervisory roles)
   4. Leading departments (employees with leadership or supervisory roles over specific departments or sub-departments)
   5. Leading organizations (employees with a significant influence on the entire organization)
3. Building job categories, using a structure like the Knowledge, Skills, and Abilities (KSA) framework, and matching those categories to the aforementioned five levels of impact.

4) Your HR Processes Aren’t Separate From Your Company Culture

To highlight one final talk, Catherine Mattice’s session “Lean into Onboarding and Performance Management to Build Company Culture” provided a handy reminder of the role that two critical HR processes play in building company culture.

Describing onboarding as “a starter pack for the employee journey”, she acknowledged that while learning about the organizational culture and the job itself are important, people are social creatures and socializing is the most important thing for many new hires. Particularly, she pointed to buddy programs, which (if done right) can improve engagement, and productivity, while helping new hires to feel more welcome, less uncertain, and more sure of what is expected of them.

Further to this, she suggested performing an “onboarding and core values” audit to “really dig into whether your organization actually lives up to, and displays your core values—and to determine if and where they show up in your onboarding program.”

Performance management, meanwhile, was lauded as solving 80% of problems if done well. Specifically, Mattice pointed to “collaborative performance management”, for its ability to encourage managers to co-create plans with their employees, while providing training and coaching and endeavoring to offer more feedback.

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