CFMA: Talent Pipelining

Contractors will face continually worsening talent shortages through 2030.

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Those that want to continue sustainable growth must manage every aspect of their talent management processes with the same rigor they would manage a fast-track project with $100K per day in liquidated damages.

The Construction Talent War - Talent Pipelining.

On November 15th, Katie McConnell and David Brown kicked-off the first of a three-part series focused on talent.   

  1. Diagnosing the Biggest Talent Bottlenecks for CFMA Sacramento Members
  1. Fixing Your Biggest Talent Bottlenecks
  1. Building Benefit Packages and Perks Beyond Compensation for a Competitive Advantage 

A few interesting takeaways from the first session were:

  • When asked what their hiring challenges were, nearly 100% of the audience cited external market factors, which included the shortage of talent. To begin solving the problem, we must first start looking inwardly at the areas they can control and, more specifically, those that matter
  • Of the 83% of people who stated their challenge was not enough qualified talent, 50% of those also rated their Talent Pipelining process as effective (an ‘A’ or ‘B’). This is a little bit like stating your sales process is effective but not achieving the sales you want.  

The next step in solving a problem is to recognize that we may be looking at our internal processes and capabilities with more rose-colored glasses than we think. We actually may not even know what we don’t know. 




Effective Project Review Meetings
Project execution is the #1 priority for contractors. Effective project review meetings are the #1 control mechanism for ensuring projects stay on-track.
Collections and Retention Trend Metric
Assuming that a contractor’s project team has done an effective job of aggressively billing the project, the biggest variable that remains for cash flow is the effectiveness of collections.
Balancing Exploration and Exploitation
Exploitation involves choosing the best option based on current knowledge of the system which may be incomplete or misleading. Exploration involves testing new options that could lead to better future outcomes but drawing resources away from exploitation.