Talent Development Approaches For Competitiveness among Five Star Hotels in Nairobi City County, Kenya
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.53819/81018102t2188Abstract
The hospitality sector in Kenya is experiencing a shortage of critical knowledge, skills and abilities in key positions. The adoption of talent development approaches for critical positions and for the high performers and potential individuals within the sector would create great value that would generate a competitive edge. In the backdrop of this, the study sought to establish the extent to which talent development approaches influenced the competitiveness among five–star hotels in Nairobi City County. Using the exclusive talent management concept, this study hypothesized that there were no significant talent development approaches that influenced competitiveness among five–star hotels in Nairobi City County. Mixed method research design was used in which there were two levels of respondents. Level one comprised of the human resources executives (talent and training executives) whose sample was 22. Level two consisted of the line executives (food and beverage production, food and beverage service, front office, finance, and housekeeping) whose sample was 55. Data was obtained using both semi-structured questionnaires and interviews respectively. The results confirmed the initial hypothesis of the causal relationship all the eleven of the talent development approaches on the competitiveness among five star hotels in Nairobi City County, Kenya. This suggests that the approaches profiled for talent development have not generated the impact that is expected of them. Therefore; the content, the manner of implementation, monitoring and evaluation of these approaches need to be reviewed for improvement. This study focused only on talent considered high potentials and performers (exclusive talent management) which would limit the generalizability to other levels of the workforce. Therefore, other studies based on inclusive talent management are proposed for generalizability purposes. The five – star hotels looking to be competitive and sustainable by creating unique products to adopt the retention of talent and tacit knowledge approaches based on the concept of exclusive talent management. This is one of the first studies dealing with the approaches of talent and knowledge retention based on the exclusive talent management concept in the hospitality sector of Kenya.
Key words: Talent development, talent management, unique knowledge, skills, and abilities
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