Future-Proof Your Workforce With Succession Planning

Put in place succession planning processes to help your organisation achieve continuity during times of change.

No matter how settled or successful a workforce is, there will always be times of change and upheaval — and it’s at those times that you reap the rewards of detailed succession planning.

Some of your people will inevitably reach retirement age, take maternity leave, need long-term sick leave or move on to new roles elsewhere. Although all organisations face these challenges, they still cause disruption. That is especially true if the person leaving your organisation is in a key role or an important leadership position.

Succession planning is about easing that disruption, ensuring a smooth transition and an immediate continuation of business as usual. 

Benefits of succession planning

There are several key benefits of future-proofing your workforce through succession planning. These include:

Leadership continuity

Smooth succession means less chance of your organisation becoming a rudderless ship. Everyone knows where they stand, there is no vacuum in leadership and less chance of a domino effect of several people leaving in quick succession.

Lower recruitment costs

Recruitment is expensive, particularly when hiring for senior roles at short notice. Developing internal recruitment candidates for key roles can deliver substantial savings for your organisation.

Closing skills gaps

A proactive approach to succession planning puts your organisation on a strong footing to identify, monitor and address any skills gaps that emerge within your workforce.

Retaining institutional knowledge and culture

Succession planning ensures that key knowledge is retained during periods of change. Promoting people ingrained with your organisation’s culture minimises disruption and increases continuity.

Career progression

Clear succession planning processes show your people that there are career progression opportunities within the organisation. This encourages loyalty and becomes both a means and an end to reducing staff turnover.

How to achieve successful succession planning   

Succession planning starts by putting in place a series of carefully targeted, methodical measures — many of which can be streamlined or automated by using your learning management system.

To future-proof your workforce with succession planning:

Identify key roles

Collate a list of all the key roles that need succession planning measures. This is likely to include any role in which the incumbent leaving would either cause mild panic or give you a significant problem to solve.

Identify skills gaps

There is a wealth of valuable information to be found within the powerful LMS reporting systems of platforms such as Totara LMS and Moodle Workplace. Dig into your LMS analytics to discover if your organisation has a deficit of any skills or competencies.

Build role profiles

Again using your LMS reporting data, create profiles based on traits or skills that suggest suitability for a particular role. Perhaps all current members of your senior leadership team excelled on a particular soft skills course or maybe people with a specific competency are well-suited to a role.  

Identify successors

Once you’ve built role profiles, you can once again use your LMS reports to find possible successors for each of your key roles. This will be based on how well their experience, skills and other attributes match the role profile.

Create personalised learning pathways

Your identified successors can then be placed on automated learning pathways that are personalised to their needs. This could involve building skills they will need in their future role that they don’t currently have or strengthening any weaknesses relevant to the role profile.

Deliver leadership development programmes

Your LMS is the perfect environment to develop leadership skills within those earmarked for promotion to managerial positions. Use your learning platform to deliver a specialised leadership training programme to those learners.

Continue to monitor

Keep track of how the organisation is performing in relation to closing skills gaps and ensuring any new gaps are identified. Also, monitor potential successors to ensure they’re on the right track to step up to their new role when needed. This could include changing the role profile or adjusting their learning pathway as the role develops or new challenges arise.

Start your succession planning

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