It's 2012: do you know where the talent is? Financial executives who can rethink the workforce in terms of the geography of talent, as well as the geography of cost, will be in the best position to make informed decisions.

• Author: Heid, Michele C.
• Position: PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

A senior Finance team at a major corporation mulling long-term investments in people is more likely to start with a map than a spreadsheet. They know that finding and funding the right talent has become as much a matter of geography as of dollars. Three trends have converged to bring about this fundamental shift in perspective--and responsibility--for financial executives:

* Finance serves more than ever as a strategic business partner to the CEO and top management team;

* People issues now stand at the center of strategy, as the chief source of competitive advantage continues to shift from tangible assets to talent; and

* As a result of globalization and the uneven development of talent from country to country, strategic investments in talent are a question not only of who but of where.

Dramatic shifts in the distribution, availability and nature of talent are taking place around the world. Boldly stated: in the Western democracies, workforce skills and skilled workers are in increasingly short supply. Conversely, in India, China, Korea and other Asian countries, there is an enormous and growing supply of workforce-ready people. Despite these gains in Asia, however, jobs across all industries are becoming more complex, demanding ever-higher skill levels and pushing up the demand for skilled workers.

As companies increasingly compete on the basis of talent, their success will largely hinge on their ability to recruit, develop, deploy and retain skilled people at every level--from production employees and technicians to scientists and engineers to middle managers and executive leaders.

Because the critical issue will be talent, when finance executives put on their "strategy hats" at the company off-site or in the councils of top leadership, they will need to focus on talent management if their companies are to achieve the kind of competitive advantage through people that has long been talked about but rarely achieved.

Five- and 10-year strategic plans have to take into account not only where the talent is now, but where it will be in the future. Which countries have the strongest pipeline of talent? What will change? And what impact will it have on strategic planning for the medium term?

In the past, the answers to such questions were based largely on impressions about which countries attracted and developed talent most effectively, but objective data to support those impressions was unavailable. The Global Talent Index (GTI), a research study designed to identify where talent is located in the world today and where it will be located five years from now, provides answers based on comprehensive evidence.

Backed with hard data, finance leaders can begin, literally, mapping out their long-term investments in people.

Developed and conducted by Heidrick & Struggles and the Economist Intelligence Unit, the study measures the potential of 30 countries to develop talent on the basis of seven separate measures...