Talent Development Challenges and Opportunities in the 4th Industrial Revolution: A Boundaryless Career Theory Perspectives

The Fourth Industrial Revolution, driven by technological advancements, digitization, biological, and physical innovations, generates enormous challenges and opportunities in all aspects of humans and global business arenas. Viewing through a boundaryless career theory standpoint, this chapter highlights findings for the two overarching questions: (1) Are we developing the vital talents in demand for a boundaryless career era? (2) How can we overcome the talent development challenges arising from a highly technologized business world? The findings are that talent is an evolving concept; there are multiple meanings in multiple contexts. A multiplicity of conceptualizations and a lack of universal consensus make it difficult for one country to define and adopt a unified talent development and management model. This chapter is useful for practitioners, educators, interested communities, and theoreticians to redefine talents to assimilate a broader meaning of talents, innovate various talent management models, methods, and ways of talent identification, acquisition, development, and retention. Individuals need to take charge of self-development of high demanding talents to better prepare them for the emerging boundaryless career requirements to secure promising careers. This is useful for organizations in developing innovative ways to locate, identify, nurture, and retain high-performing talents to achieve strategic goals.