Talent management in Academia Is it worth it to differentiate between the professors in a university?

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the currently limited research area Talent Management in Academia and investigate if an exclusive approach is valuable to adapt in an organizational education context. This is done by examining if it is worth differentiating between the professors in a university. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology used in this study consist of two main steps, a literature review, and data analysis. The data analyzed was gathered during a fouryear period at Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), which is a technological university located in Catalunya, Spain. This study investigated how different variables were related to the professor’s performance, which is measured mainly by the number of published articles. Findings – The result proposes that there are variations of the performance between different professors based on their position, type of employment contract, as well as their belonging to the field of knowledge and department. This indicates that it is of importance to differentiate between the professors in order to increase the university’s competitive position. In accordance, new Talent Management practices and workforce differentiation strategies could be implemented. Originality/value – The majority of existing research about Talent Management in Academia is performed at Dutch Universities. Therefore, this paper creates value by examining Talent Management in a currently unexplored context, at a Spanish University