The Talent Edge | November 2025 Edition
Hey Talent friends, how’s Q4 treating you? If the sprint’s starting to feel real, here are a few quick reads to help you pause, reset, and tap into that clean-slate energy waiting on the other side of December.
Inside:
- How AI is closing (and creating) new skill gaps
- What to do when knowledge outpaces experience
- AI hacks for your global talent strategy
Virtual event: Developing high-po talent for the world that’s coming
December 11, 2025 | 1:00 p.m. ET
If your leadership pipeline feels out of sync with where your business is headed, you’re not alone. This session introduces future-back thinking, a practical method that starts with your organization’s future goals and works backward to define the leaders, skills, and experiences it will take to get there.
Together we’ll cover how to:
- Redefine high-potential identification through a future-focused lens
- Avoid the pitfalls that will stall your competitor’s pipeline programs
- Build the capabilities your future strategy will depend on
- Accelerate readiness through experiential learning
When experience stops being the teacher
Emerging leaders are growing up in a world where experience is optional, and that’s a problem.
AI, automation, and constant change mean knowledge is everywhere, instantly. What’s missing is discernment, the hard-won judgment that used to come from time, mentorship, and real-world trial and error.
According to Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends report, while 85% of leaders say independent decision-making is more critical than ever, only 26% believe their organizations are ready to support it.
The result? A widening leadership experience gap.
How to get ahead of this emerging reality:
- Replacing lost “apprenticeship moments” with mentorship, simulation, and deliberate practice.
- Designing workflows that make human sense-making essential, treating AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot.
- Making judgment measurable by assessing decision-making under ambiguity.
- Developing judgment earlier in the pipeline, not waiting for senior roles to teach it.
AI hacks for your global talent strategy
When you’re leading across markets, functions, and time zones, “leadership” can quietly start to mean different things in different places.
And when those differences pile up, they don’t just make development messy, they change how the business sees Talent. From the outside, leadership development can look like a local craft project instead of a strategic capability. Each region runs its own version, success stays local, and metrics don’t roll up. Suddenly, Talent looks busy, but not business critical.
That perception gap matters. Once development feels fragmented, ROI and relevance are the first things questioned.
The good news: we finally have tools built for the reality Talent leaders have been managing forever - complex, global, and human.
AI-powered platforms now make it possible to:
- See what’s really happening across markets and turn nuance into data you can use.
- Connect coaching, learning, and assessment in one system instead of ten different ones.
- Measure readiness and impact with data you can trust, not a patchwork of spreadsheets.
- Scale development without flattening the local context or human connection.
(Shameless, but helpful, plug...) That’s exactly what Sounding Board, a BTS company, was designed to do. It creates an end-to-end coaching ecosystem with AI-driven matching, real coaches, shared frameworks, integrated data, and dashboards that actually show progress across your business.
Here’s how it works:
- Coaching network. A global bench of certified coaches matched to leaders using AI-driven algorithms based on role, goals, and context.
- Unified platform. Coaching, learning goals, assessments, and progress data live in one system, giving HR and business leaders visibility across cohorts and regions.
- Data and analytics. Real-time dashboards show engagement, skill development, and impact metrics, linking coaching outcomes to business results.
- Integration and alignment. The platform connects coaching to existing leadership frameworks, competencies, and learning paths, turning one-off sessions into a system of continuous development.
Because sometimes the missing piece isn’t another program, it’s the system that finally connects them all.
Don’t take our word for it…
Learn how one global media organization used it to align and develop thousands of leaders across 170+ countries.
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