“You must manage human capital as wisely as financial capital.” This is the exhortation of the influential business book Talent Wins.1 As the authors argue, talent is a critical business input—and companies should deploy analytical rigour to assess, segment, invest in and reallocate human capital, just as they would with financial capital.
In this article, we present the findings of our analysis of talent in the United Kingdom, and show that there is a strong economic case for reskilling current employees or promising new hires. We define reskilling in a broad sense, including both upskilling—advancing workers’ current skills—and retraining, the provision of new skills to enable a change in role.
