Talent policy

The identification and development of talent have long been a central target of policy making invarious domains, including education, sports, the arts and business. Given the importance of tal-ent for success in a competitive global market, governments and businesses across the globe con-tinually devise strategic policies to identify, attract and preserve both national and internationaltalent. Most of these talent-related practices and policies (implicitly) assume that a person’s talentis predetermined and fixed, that it is readily identifiable and that effective talent developmentrequires early identification and specific, targeted training. However, these assumptions areproblematically unsupported by recent empirical and conceptual scientific research. Instead,the research shows that talent development is dynamic and context-dependent, and that earlyidentification is an unreliable predictor of future performance. We outline the conceptual ambi-guity and empirical flaws involved in current talent-related practices and propose three specificsolutions to improve policy.