Australasian Talent Conference
Just back from our 5th Talent Management Conference in Sydney. It was a great success with about 400 people sharing ideas, networking, and learning together. These events remind me how far we have left to go to make the virtual world as rich as the face-to-face one, although I have no doubt we will eventually get close. Our range of topics was greater than our range of attendees and it was painfully obvious that we still have big silos of expertise and not yet much sharing and collaboration across those silos. The learning folks appreciated the speakers on serious gaming and mobile learning, while the recruiters basked warmly during the sessions on social networking. There were many new technologies – many beginning to stretch the conventional boundaries: real-time, just-in-time search for candidates as opposed to building databases and communities using natural language as opposed to Boolean strings and arcane bits of knowledge. The technology I saw makes the future of traditional job boards more and more tenuous – time for a big reinvention!
Social media is growing in importance and I think every speaker indicated their organization was doing something with social media. And of course, LinkedIn was popular with attendees, both because it is the leading social media platform for professionals in Australia but also because of its very recent IPO. Find.ly, a new technology developed by a Kiwi living in the U.S. showed how real-time search can actually work.
Emerging topics that will be featured next year include a more complete integration of workforce planning, recruiting, learning, and performance management into talent management as well as new approaches to workforce planning, better and more useful analytics, and the application of quality standards and measures to talent management.
We’ll be offering one-day programs on Sourcing and Social Media later this year.
Wine
Australia offers so much in the way of wine if you are a wine lover (almost wrote wino!). We decided to drive back to Melbourne from Sydney – a formidable journey through the nation’s capital of Canberra. We stopped in Murrumbateman at Shaw Vineyard and enjoyed a nice Cab/Merlot, and from there to the Flint for dinner.
At the recommendation of the folks at the Flint, we stayed at the Country Guesthouse Schonegg which is run by Evelyn and Richard Everson. Wonderful folks who include a home cooked breakfast to boot!
Then it was on to continue our 3-day trip full of autumn foliage, small villages, and warm pubs, pies and wine. The nicest wine area was in the Rutherglen area – a few hundred miles northeast of Melbourne. There we stopped by a dozen or so of the best and sampled generously.
Favorites included Anderson Winery which grows vines without irrigation producing a rich, big red.
Campbell’s Bobby Burns Shiraz, and their really magnificent The Barkley Durif.
A quick stop at Stanton and Kileen Wines for a Muscat and a chance to meet Trouble, their cat.
Then on to All Saint’s, one of the oldest of Australia’s wineries, for a sampling of Muscat’s and reds.
and finally to Pfeiffer Wines for some rather nice Shiraz. So much wine, so little time. . .
But no trip to Australia would be complete without a pie – a real meat pie rather than the traditional American fruit pie. And Parker Pies is an award-winning shop, known throughout Australia for some of the best. We stopped by for one pie, ate two, and took a dozen home!
So we enjoyed our brief 3-day sojourn and headed back to Melbourne to plan for next year’s ATC Sydney conference and all the ones inbetween. Check out the website for details and also for archived slides, videos and information on our past conferences. I’ll be publishing articles on the ATC blog as well as here, so please drop by from time to time.
Hope to see you at one of our conferences soon.
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