Title: Talent Management: Retention and development of employees

Level: Bachelor’s Degree in Business and Administration

Authors: Amra Abdulic Dzankovic and Anna Jaurén

Supervisor: Per-Arne Wikström

Date: June 2013

Aim: The purpose of this study is to examine how an organization can implement talent management strategies to retain and develop their employees. We intend to increase the understanding of talent management by highlighting various strategies to retain and develop employees.

Methodology: The study has been carried out with a qualitative approach through a case study in cooperation with a large organization within the public sector in Sweden. Empirical material has been collected through semi-structured interviews with all the divisional managers. An extensive analysis of literature and research connected to Talent Management and tools for retention and development has formed the basis of the theoretical framework.

Result and Conclusion: The conclusions we have drawn from this study is that to succeed with Talent Management, and the strategies that are in place to retain and develop employees, there must be an integral and comprehensive approach where business strategy and vision also permeates personnel strategy. To meet the growing challenges that today’s organizations are facing, we have concluded that development and different methods to get top talent to remain in the organization is critically important for companies to make the most of their human capital. The organization that we have implemented our study on uses several strategies to retain and develop employees, even if they do not work according to a pronounced TM strategy.

Suggestions for further research: As an alternative to our study, we believe it would be interesting to conduct a survey based on the employees' perspective. It would be interesting to see how staff perceives the work around different Talent Management strategies when it comes to retaining and developing employees, and if they see some pros and cons with this work.

Contribution: Our study contributes to a better understanding of Talent Management and various tools to retain and develop employees. The study also contributes to a better understanding of whether these tools can be applied to a public organization, more specifically a Swedish university. Previous research is mainly focused on the U.S. and Canadian markets, which primarily are focused on whether TM can contribute to economic benefits. We have chosen to implement our study on a Swedish organization on the Swedish market, and therefore contribute to the research, by implementing Talent Management in Sweden. The study also contributes to the research gap, which we demonstrated in our problem discussion, how development can be implemented and communicated in organizations, within the framework of Talent Management. We have also addressed the growing problems with retention of employees. Through our study, we believe that we have made a contribution to previous research where we focused primarily on various tools to retain and develop employees. We believe that this is something that is critically important because the staff is one of the most important assets in knowledge intensive organizations.

Key words: Talent Management, Talent Development, retention and development of employees