The emphasis on simple survival in many industries in 2009 meant that HR often had to sideline strategic initiatives and focus on fire-fighting and restructuring. But with the worst of the downsizing phase now hopefully behind us I would forecast this will change in the coming year. In a think-tank of HR functions from companies such as Axa, GE, KPMG and Mercer that Ochre House held in the autumn, one of the key worries voiced by participants was that the current low level of staff attrition was down to enforced, rather than genuine loyalty and that any sustained signs of an economic upturn would see the war for talent breaking out again with a vengeance.

These worries seem to be justified by the latest research report by PwC which suggest that a third of workers are intent on changing jobs at the first viable opportunity. What this means is that 2010 is likely to be a year when employee engagement moves back towards the top of the HR agenda. However, in order to justify the investment of resources in this area, HR departments will have to learn to connect effective employee engagement with demonstrable financial Results – few boards will be willing to throw money at schemes in the coming year unless they can see some obvious and compelling return on investment.

This will mean taking the lead of pioneers such as the former management team at the supermarket chain Somerfield, which instituted parallel satisfaction surveys covering both employees and customers, thereby showing a clear link between happy workers, happy consumers and rising sales. And if HR can learn such a lesson in 2010 it may take a major step towards dealing with the often heard criticism that it does not adequately speak the language of business.

Of course not every business suffered heavily in 2009. A small but significant minority had already managed to establish products or services that needed little immediate modification, let alone complete re-engineering, to meet the upheavals in the marketplace, so the impact of the recession on their workforces was noticeably lighter. While others retrenched they were able to invest in the redeployment of staff, develop their employee value propositions and build robust talent programmes from acquisition through development to retention.

The existence of such organisations means that HR professionals in less resilient businesses will need to act fast if they are not to remember 2010 as the time when their precious talent pools dwindled to crisis levels, leaving their parent organisations unable to benefit from the recovery.

So what will this mean in practice? After a long period when the HR community debated and investigated the concept of complete talent management, I believe that the Challenges of 2010 may mean it will go down as the year when organisations really began to implement it.

Instead of taking the all too common approach of allowing talent management’s constituent elements – recruitment, engagement, development and retention – to be siloed, more and more businesses will find ways of effectively joining them up. Some will do this under their own steam, but a growing number will turn to outside help to make it happen. This will mean that the brief of outsourcing specialists like my own company will broaden.

Instead of a relatively narrow, traditional focus on recruitment we will find ourselves called upon to contribute to all aspects of the talent management process, leaving in-house HR specialists free to focus on strategic initiatives which will bring them into much closer relationships with the commercial management of their parent organisations.

2010 is also likely to be the year when the need to react to a varying global economic picture will mean that more international businesses will invest seriously in genuine global talent management. This will not mean that such companies will implement a completely standard approach to talent management across the world – the need to adapt to local circumstance, legal frameworks and cultural contexts will still be paramount – but they will begin to build sets of structures and guidelines which will give greater consistency of both approach and quality to the people aspect of their business.