Giving Talents a Voice: Talent Management in the Aerospace Industry

Abstract

Although Talent Management (TM) has been studied for the last two decades, the empirical knowledge represents a highly managerial view on the phenomenon. Those important studies that investigated TM from both managers’ and talents’ perspectives are scarce and quite fragmented since they focus only on one or two components of TM. In this work, we examine TM holistically by focusing on five main TM components together – talent definition, TM goals, attraction, development, and retention of talents – through the perspectives of managers and talented individuals. To that end, we interviewed 40 talents and their managers in the aerospace industry in Luxembourg. We identified shared, exclusively managers’ and exclusively talents’ views of TM and named them “functional”, “pragmatic” and “romanticized” respectively. By combining the shared view and expected views, we propose an ideal TM for talent and an ideal TM for managers.