SUCCESSION planning guide INTRODUCTION While all employees contribute to an organization’s success, some positions are more critical. The loss of employees in these positions can be devastating. These positions are called key positions, as they are the key to an organization’s success. Unfortunately, you can expect increased turnover among employees in these positions over the next few years, as many of these employees are approaching the ends of their careers. As they possess critical knowledge and skills that you can ill afford to be without for long periods of time, planning must occur to ensure that employees are prepared to replace them when they leave. This planning effort is called succession planning. Predicted labor market shortages in many occupational areas increase the criticality of succession planning as external recruitment will be difficult. In addition to key positions, succession planning also covers identifying hard-to-fill positions and preparing internal employees to fill them to avoid costly, time consuming, and often futile recruitment efforts. In addition to preparing employees to replace departing employees, succession planning also includes: • plans to recruit externally when it is not feasible to prepare internal employees. • temporary plans so that critical work can continue during the recruitment and selection process. • alternate approaches such as reorganization, or the use of contractors when filling a key or hard-to-recruit position, is not practical. To summarize, succession planning is a systematic process to identify key and hard-to-recruit positions, identify the critical competencies that employees in those positions possess, and prepare for their replacement to ensure t...
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