Engage Employees with Career Planning and Succession Development

Get the skills you need, keep the staff you want.

More Details

Scope: Successfully tackling staffing contingencies relies on investment in a longer-term career planning and succession development practice.
Challenge: Building a steady and reliable IT staffing contingent is getting harder. Unexpected staff departures combined with belt tightening, retiring Baby Boomers, diminishing ranks of fresh IT grads, and the changing work expectations of Generation-Y have created more hurdles to attracting, retaining, and developing IT talent than ever before.
Pain/Risk: While having the perfect skill set available at the perfect time may be too idealistic, succession planning can mitigate the opportunity and productivity risks associated with talent gaps.

Critical Insight

Succession plans need to be in place up and down the entire chain of command, not just management roles. In some organizations, the loss of a lower echelon technical staffer can have a greater immediate negative impact than the loss of a CIO.
Replacing an employee costs 50% to 200% of that person’s annual salary. Succession development can cut this to 5-10%.
Don’t prepare just one individual to take over a single role – instead, prepare broader pools of talent that can be dynamically drawn upon as needed.
Unlike other processes, succession planning does not benefit from economies of scale since it is about matching individual personal aspirations to business needs. As a department grows, this tailored matching process becomes more complex to manage. The amount of time you hope to invest in order to achieve the benefits must be a major consideration.

Impact and Result

Gain insight into the key steps for succession planning.
Measure your organizational need and preparedness for succession planning.
Assess the greatest points of risk in your staffing contingent.
Pinpoint who has the potential to fulfill certain roles and each individual’s ability to advance.
Map required and completed training activities towards achieving promotion objectives.
Measure the overall effectiveness of your succession planning practice.

Understand current risks to IT staffing stability
Make the case for formal succession development
- Storyboard: Engage Employees with Career Planning and Succession Development
Internalize what succession development is and is not
Predict and sidestep succession development challenges
- Succession Development: Get It Right
Learn the key steps to the succession development process
Set scope, rank priorities and implement a plan of action
- Succession Development Planning Tool
- Career Development Plan Template
Measure results
Determine if your succession development efforts are working
- Role Transition Plan