Talent and Skills

How We Help Clients Build a Talent and Skills Advantage

Talent advantage sparks competitive advantage. It boosts innovation and creates a meaningful improvement in business outcomes, ensuring that companies have the right skills when they need them. It also helps companies continually develop their expertise while improving time to hire, internal mobility, and talent productivity. We take an integrated, end-to-end approach to talent development because there are many facets to creating—and unleashing—a talent advantage.

Top-performing companies make attracting, developing, and retaining talent a key priority, proactively addressing workplace changes and the fierce competition for skills and know-how. But they also understand that to nurture growth, they need to nurture talent. Mastering talent strategy and solving the complex talent equation in a skill-based world means mastering four key dimensions:

• Anticipate. BCG is a pioneer in translating business and technology objectives into talent strategies. We leverage AI-enabled tools such as TalentBuilder by BCG X to help clients create skills-based workforce planning capabilities to better forecast their talent needs, understand the skills they have today, and how to address the gaps. We work with our clients to design sustainable talent and skills ecosystems with a strong foundation in modern skills architecture and job-matching algorithms. This prepares organizations to keep pace with generative AI, climate and sustainability, and other trends influencing skills-based workforce planning.
• Attract. How do you attract the best talent in a hypercompetitive market? Our innovative approach to talent and skills views the process through the employee lens, creating a candidate-centric journey enabled by digital and AI. These journeys drive better effectiveness and efficiency with responsive HR practices that accelerate talent acquisition, enabling the company and candidate get to work quickly. We deliver cutting-edge talent sourcing strategies, such as multifaceted employer value proposition programs and “hire-train-deploy” models, deaveraged by role, that unlock hidden talent pools both externally and internally.
• Develop. Whether it’s the evolution of digital and AI or the need to address climate and sustainability issues, we believe people development programs must prepare a workforce for the rapidly changing future. BCG U combines the expertise of world-class faculty with technology to provide the necessary organizational learning programs and comprehensive upskilling solutions to ensure clear return on investments. We design contextualized programs with a strong focus on always-on learning to provide instruction in real-world, on-the-job scenarios. Our digitally enabled programs follow a build–operate–transfer principle to activate impact-driving groups at scale, refreshed and equipped to thrive as the business evolves.
• Engage. To truly flourish, companies need to inspire and empower talent. We help clients do this by creating an employee value proposition grounded in the company’s purpose, culture, and overall talent and skills strategy. Our experts enhance employee career journeys while cultivating an employee-centric next-generation HR function and building diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives. Crucial to it all: we help develop “generative” leaders who craft an inspiring and enriching experience for their people and advance the company’s values.

For many organizations, significant upskilling is necessary to deploy next-generation capabilities and new technologies such as Generative AI. Talent, organizational processes, and culture enable effective, lasting results from tech transformation and other large-scale change programs. We know, too, that some companies have more targeted needs requiring tailored talent and skills programs in areas of talent sourcing strategy or employee retention strategy, for instance. Others require innovative workforce planning strategies to develop sustained cost management advantage.

Whether transforming for sustained results in digitization, climate, efficiency, or the future of work, our talent and skills consulting teams embed the end-to-end approach that defines our work—and helps perfect yours.