Talent management departments keen to help employees develop their communication and influencing skills need to make sure people are presented with opportunities and appropriate feedback, an industry expert has said.

Talent management departments keen to help employees develop their communication and influencing skills need to make sure people are presented with opportunities and appropriate feedback, an industry expert has said.

The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development's (CIPD) learning and development advisor, Martyn Sloman, suggested that it was vitally important in the modern workplace that graduates were helped to develop influencing skills.

He added that talent management departments had a role to play, offering employees valuable feedback about how these skills were improving.

"It is largely thought that such skills are mainly developed on the job, through experience. This can happen through feedback," Mr Sloman explained.

"The phrase I like is 'support and challenge', so staff get feedback and are supported and challenged in the workplace and that's how we come to recognise clusters of skills."

In general, Mr Sloman suggested that the talent management in many businesses in the UK was improving, with "far more feedback in the workplace and coaching from individual line managers".