We live in a so called talent driven age, where our organizations laud their employees as being a key differential in the marketplace.  Yet whilst it has long been possible to assign value to other assets, it has been slightly less easy to do so with the rather less tangible knowledge and skills within the minds of our employees.

And so the Valuing Your Talent challenge was born.  The challenge was created by the RSA in conjunction with a host of professional bodies, including the CIPD and CMI.  It offers £10,000 to the person/s that can help develop a universal framework to help value the talent within our organizations.

The challenge comes in several phases:

1. Insight will see ideas sought from people as to what the problem is with valuing talent.  This may include some of the barriers, examples of attempts and so on.
2. Reflection will see the inputs from phase 1 collated and curated together to try and form a coherent narrative.
3. After the first stages have framed the problem, the Innovation phase will look to tackle it.
4. Selection will then be undertaken by the challenge’s panel of judges.

This last stage is set to commence during May, so there is ample time to garner insights from the management community.

CMI chief executive Ann Francke stressed that leaders looking to get the most out of their employees should be ready and willing to take part in the scheme. “Managers stand to benefit hugely from better understanding the value of their workforce,” she said, “because that’s a key way of achieving greater productivity, operational improvements and improved customer satisfaction.”

Alas, my own attempts to participate were hampered by technical issues.  It isn’t clear whether participation is only open to RSA members, or indeed members from the partner organizations.  It’s also interesting to note that despite an open innovation platform being used, the challenge is still limiting thoughts to how to value the talent available within organizations.  No mention is made of how organizations can value talent that they have access to, albeit from beyond their payroll, which is a shame.

Anyway, the webpage isn’t particularly clear on how the £10,000 will be selected, nor indeed who will be selecting the winner, but if talent management is something you’re interested in, this might be one to follow.