Capabilities for Talent Development: Shaping the Future of the Profession

What Talent Development Professionals Should Know and Do to Be Successful

The talent development field is deep and wide, encompassing the efforts that foster learning and employee development to drive organizational performance, productivity, and results. Major societal forces and business changes require talent development professionals across all industries to adopt new approaches and upgrade skills to keep pace and grow. Capabilities for Talent Development presents the new ATD Capability Model, a powerful framework to guide the profession in what practitioners need to know and do to develop themselves, others, and their organizations.

ATD’s research shows that the future of work will require talent development professionals to leverage interpersonal skills, along with their professional expertise, to work as a true business partner to achieve organizational goals. As organizations respond to trends in business, science, and technology―such as artificial intelligence and automation, brain-based learning, new ways to enlist skilled talent brought on by the gig economy, and other factors―professionals must develop their knowledge and skills from three domains of practice:

Building Personal Capability

Developing Professional Capability

Impacting Organizational Capability

Capabilities for Talent Development offers an in-depth look at the Model and its components, drawing from the research behind it. Inside are application tips for individuals, educators, and organizations, as well as examples and interviews with thought leaders that describe an exciting future ahead for the talent development field.

The ATD Capability Model is future-oriented and can help you personalize your development needs. Grow your career as you grow your knowledge and skills in talent development.

Courtney Vital is a senior executive at the Association for Talent Development leading learning initiatives that enable professionals to achieve their potential, demonstrate their credibility, and advance their career. She is passionate about helping organizations reimagine how learning is designed and delivered to align with the realities of the modern workforce.. With experience leading global learning businesses in the association, nonprofit, and for-profit environments, Courtney's areas of expertise include learning and education product strategy; program design and development, including learning ecosystems, credentialing, certificate and certification programs, workshops, events, and e-learning courses; evolving traditional learning products into modularized, digital learning experiences; assessment and evaluation; competency models and stackable learning and credentialing paths; and learning technology implementations. Courtney has spent more than a decade at ATD, growing ATD's education business into a global training operation that has served more than 100,000 learners to date. She previously served as chief learning officer for the Human Capital Institute, where she oversaw HCI's strategy and thought leadership around learning, as well as a product line of certification programs targeted to senior HR professionals. She has a mix of subject matter expertise in the L&D, talent, and HR spaces, a deep technical understanding of learning experience design and development, and hands-on operational experience building education businesses. Courtney holds the Certified Professional in Learning and Performance credential, as well as a BA in journalism and mass communications from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is a master's in adult education candidate at Pennsylvania State University. Courtney lives in the Washington, D.C., area with her husband and two daughters.Patricia Galagan covered the training and talent development for nearly 40 years as a writer and editor for the Association for Talent Development (formerly ASTD) before retiring in 2019. She began her career as editor of ASTD's Training & Development Journal and was the founding editor of Technical Training magazine and Learning Circuits, ASTD's first digital magazine. With ATD CEO Tony Bingham, Pat interviewed more than 50 CEOs of major companies for the TD Magazine series At C Level. She also wrote a quarterly column on trends in talent development for TD Magazine for several years, and managed content for the Senior Leaders and Executives Community of Practice. Pat served as co-editor for The Executive Guide to Integrated Talent Management with Kevin Oakes. Pat has an undergraduate degree in French from the College of St. Elizabeth, and a graduate degree in English from George Mason University. Since her retirement from ATD, Pat has turned her lifelong passion for photography into a full-time profession as a fine-art photographer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She and her husband, Philip Metcalf, co-authored Fire Ghosts, a photography book about new forest landscapes in an age of wildfires (George F. Thompson Publishing, 2019). Her photography has been shown at galleries in the United States, Cuba, and Switzerland. As director of credentialing for the Association for Talent Development, Morgean Hirt brings more than 25 years of nonprofit experience in personnel certification and accreditation across a variety of professions. Morgean has devoted her career to advancing professions through the establishment of industry standards. She provides strategic leadership and technical expertise in developing and implementing credentialing programs, focusing on policy and standards development, test development, board and committee governance, program audits, strategic planning, and ANSI/ISO 17024 and NCCA accreditation. Morgean has led a number of organizations through establishing industry standards for emerging professions, including clinical research, massage therapy, and mortgage brokering. Prior to joining ATD, Morgean spent 10 years as present and CEO of Certified Fund Raising Executives International Credentialing Board, and was responsible for establishing international support across six continents for a unified standard of fundraising practice. She also has served as a senior account executive with Metacred, a boutique association management firm specializing in credentialing management, where her clients included several IT-related associations. Morgean lives in the Washington, D.C., area and is an active member of the Institute for Credentialing Excellence (ICE), serving as a member of the Education and Program Committees and as a presenter at the ICE Exchange.