By Mark Brandau, Senior Director, Product Marketing

Some of the best lessons in talent management come from the men and women who serve in the military. Think about it: Branches of the military include global organizations that provide resources to numerous stakeholders, requiring talent that keeps up with skills training and development opportunities in order to ensure a leadership pipeline. They may be in uniform, but military organizations face similar challenges that your company might.

There are three key areas that drive talent management integration in the military:

• Scale: Think of the hundreds of thousands of servicemen and servicewomen in the military. All of those people need to be aided not just by fundamental HR services, but also with career development and support.There’s no way this can happen on paper anymore. Think of a technology system that grows with you as you expand. You’ll be reducing errors and processing time, but still managing talent across the organization.

• Location: Military personnel work all over the world in a wide variety of environments and conditions. That means they need to have options for self-service talent management. Your global teams are in the same boat. Create access to performance and goal management. Launch social tools for collaboration. You remove the obstacles of location and time-zone challenges by delivering access to employees.

• Development: All employees need development, especially to ensure alignment between performance and goals. In the military, that includes not just specific training to move through the ranks, but also leadership development to earn the trust of your troops. Balance your talent management to help fill skills gaps and develop great leaders.

Talent management is not unique to business, and the military’s talent challenges are not unique to the battlefield. Leadership can be developed in any environment. These lessons should help you use technology to keep your organization aligned.