Cisco Partners Share Top Three Talent Challenges
We’ve all read that some companies are shedding jobs rather than creating them right now, but Cisco Partners have told us repeatedly that attracting, developing and retaining talent remains a top priority for them. As far back as 2006, partners were starting to tell us that talent management was shifting from being an expense of doing business to a strategic business driver.
At our annual gathering of partners, Partner Summit, in April, the theme came up again as our channel partner talent survey revealed that 48 percent of partners were finding the hiring of technical talent and 34 percent the hiring of sales talent ‘difficult’. At the time, Celia Harper-Guerra, senior director, partner talent acquisition program at Cisco, presented a holistic Cisco partner talent strategy aimed at helping partners address those challenges, including the launch of the Cisco Partner Talent Network.
Six months on, at last week’s Cisco Channel Exchange in Lisbon, Portugal, we caught up with Celia again and asked her how the talent needs of partners have evolved since April, and specifically whether talent recruitment and retention remains a priority in the current economic environment. The results of Celia’s updated research were surprising, as this video interview shows.
Posted by David McCulloch at 05:19PM PST
Mark McClure Coaching Dec 1, 2008
@Celia - I’ll be interested to see another video from you in March ‘09. Truly challenging times.
Re #3 in the 3-part holistic channel talent mgt approach you spoke about - “retaining top performers”.
Are channel partners using formal (and informal) career coaching and mentoring programs as part of this approach?
If they aren’t, they should be
I’ve been a tech and know something of how new skills and a varied project mix can keep a lot of folks happy (if they also believe they are being paid fairly aka market rate).
Keeping the real top performers on board so that the new blood can also benefit from their experience and knowledge would seem to be an important part of helping the partner with their long term strategic goals too.
Thx for the video - some more details on what Cisco means by “holistic” would also be helpful.