Talent management means you are mostly on your own

Do you fancy yourself a great corporate financier, aspire to be a top notch fund manager, or sense an innate ability when it comes to fixed income sales? Don't bet on the company you work for to help you along the way.

Financial services employers are not great when it comes to making the most of talented employees. This is the none-too encouraging message from a survey of London-based financial services HR directors. Of the directors surveyed, 61% said they were failing to develop talented employees, and 86% confessed people were leaving because they weren't getting enough help with career planning.

Susannah Pringle, of TalentMax, the firm behind the survey, said banks and fund managers are good at bringing talented employees through the door but don't always know what to do with them once they've arrived: 'At a lot of organisations, employees are physically there, but psychologically absent.'

Wasted talent

You may be sceptical as to TalentMax's motives here; it is a consultancy providing advice to banks on how to get the most out of their talent, after all, and it has a vested interest in pointing out banks' failings when it comes to talent management. But banking insiders admit Pringle may be on to something.

Hope Greenfield, head of corporate training and development at Lehman Brothers in New York, said the industry has a reputation for leaving employees to fend for themselves: 'Banks are tremendous at identifying talent, and managing junior people to get them up to speed. But once those employees get to a certain point they are too often left to live and die on the merits of their work.'

Pringle's research suggests that financial services employers fail to provide employees with a structured career path. It is a shortcoming familiar to people who've spent time at the coal face. Pablo Guerra, a director of Mantis Partners, a recruitment firm, and former head of institutional foreign exchange sales at an international bank in London, said banks are happy as long as people are productive in the job they were hired for: 'There isn't much encouragement to do any training that will take you away from that job.'

Fortunately, employers may be coming to terms with the error of their ways with 35% of directors surveyed saying their companies were planning to introduce talent management programmes. Greenfield said Lehman already runs mentoring programmes for junior employees to talk through career prospects with senior staff and leadership programmes for top people: 'We have taken a much more proactive stance in helping people look at the opportunities on offer.'

Nonetheless, the cutthroat nature of banking means there will always be a danger of talent going unrecognized. 'It's a numbers game,' says Guerra, 'you can only have so many chiefs and so many Indians: not everyone can become a boss.'

I'm too talented-- get me out of here

If you don't make it up, you can try and make it out. Your talents may be better appreciated somewhere else.

Alternatively, you can try and bring your attributes to the attention of your existing employer. Unfortunately, talent does not always speak for itself. Thomas Nalder at Finance Professionals, a London-based recruitment company, said people who feel their talents have been overlooked often have only themselves to blame: 'It's down to the candidate and how commercial they are being in the role. You need to develop relationships internally, draw attention to your achievements, and grow a network of people who appreciate what you can do.'