It is not only the end of the year, but the end of the first decade of a new millennium. While many are thinking about next year’s big things in Human Capital, I figured it would be fun to peer into the future to see what changes are afoot for our next decade. So let’s take a look at the crystal ball…

A great schism in the Human Resources industry between the administrative needs of compliance, regulations and benefits versus the strategic needs of identifying, developing and retaining talent will eventually come to a head, causing these HR functions to splinter into separate groups.

The more visionary HR leaders will transform into Chief Human Capital / Talent / People Officers tasked with developing the workforce while other core HR administrative functions will be folded into finance or legal functions, eventually to be outsourced entirely.

Talent management will be viewed as even more strategic and proprietary to companies, thus leading to a significant reduction in the use of outside agencies / recruiters and the growing importance of internal departments staffed with top talent scouts that are highly attuned to the needs of their organizations as opposed to simply being “order takers”.

Freed from the shackles of compliance, CHCO’s will heavily use social media, artificial intelligence, presence management and other innovate methods to attract talent. This in turn will spur greater change in the current slate of talent management and ATS vendors to build more analytical and predictive tools leading to a merger of the talent management and workforce analytics technologies.

Because of the strategic importance on talent, CHCO’s will focus solely on the management of talent; understanding and aligning resources for greater workforce productivity for the purposes of achieving defined business goals. This means successful CHCO’s will be data-driven, statistically minded executives and will use analytics tools to measure KPI’s based on capabilities inherent in workers and the workforce. Those HR leaders that do not change will be left to fend for jobs in compliance.

Human Capital will become an exact measurement that underpins all discussions of productivity and goal setting. Talent Indexing and Human Capital Risk (derived from the measurement of talent) become financial metrics used by Wall Street for evaluating investment value. This measurement will be owned by CHCO’s, who will become instrumental in boardrooms across the globe as companies realize that the alignment of talent is the last unexplored strategy to achieve sustainable growth and shareholder returns.

Business schools begin to shift teaching toward the study of Human Capital Management as a foundational requirement for successful managers and business leaders. Savvy CEO’s in waiting will come to see a career in HR as an important element of their development to the getting to and staying in the C-suite. HR will be in the triumvirate of executives along with Finance and Operations that provides the core of corporate leadership to ensure companies have the right resources and strategies in place to succeed.

And if everything goes as expected, the year 2020 could be much sooner than expected…

Have a Happy New Year and a Splendid New Decade!