- Career & Succession Management no longer only concern senior executive positions
- Skill shortages lead HR to broaden Career & Succession Management to experts on all levels
- Crucial to improve retention and engagement of employees
- Younger workforce prefers varied working experience to linear career progression
- HR challenged by desire for greater career flexibility and internal mobility
- Transparency helps retention: Information on job profiles need to be accessible to all employees
Career & Succession Management is undergoing fundamental change, driven by skill shortages, the global war for talent, and a new generation of employees valuing varied working experience and flexibility higher than traditional, linear career progression. Previously primarily concerned with strengthening the leadership pipeline, HR managers now need to redefine Career & Succession Management to improve retention of experts on all levels, as well as engagement with the employer. That is the conclusion of the Career & Succession Management Report published today by the Top Employers Institute. The study is based on a global HR Best Practices Survey among 600 companies in 96 countries.
Two global developments are forcing HR managers to rethink Career & Succession Management strategies: a) Skill shortages and a global competition for best talent, and an increased risk of losing business-critical knowledge due to the ageing of the workforce, and b) a new generation of workers that is seeking diverse work assignments and flexibility, and is taking greater responsibility for their own career management, resulting in less loyalty to their employers and less interest in the traditional step-by-step climbing of career ladders.
These developments lead to Career & Succession Management becoming more and more important within HR, as its role evolves from the former niche of assuring smooth succession of top leadership to long-term staff retention.
“A key finding of our study is that for HR managers it is no longer possible to try and hold on to top performers, applying the traditional set of incentives. What is needed is a broader approach to employee development with greater awareness for the changed needs and values of the younger workforce. HR managers have to move away from being talent hoarders to playing their part as talent producers”, said David Plink, CEO of the Top Employers Institute.
This is confirmed by Unilever, a certified Top Employer: “Clarity and transparency around career plans to all employees become increasingly important when you are dealing with talent that is very marketable”, said Antoinette Irvine, HR Vice President at Unilever. “If you want people to stay long term, and not to go anywhere else, then they need to know why they are staying, and that is very much a performance discussion, but more importantly a career discussion.”
To successfully cope with these retention challenges, strategic workforce planning has to be closely linked to Career & Succession Management in order to identify capabilities and capacities needed in the future, and to prepare for future gaps.
The study finds that organisations that are successful in Career & Succession Management increasingly use integrated technology (Talent Suites). The most common Career & Succession Management practice supported by technology is an online personal development plan (85% of top performing companies have this in place), followed by competency models (79%), and employee profiles (75%). The least technology-supported practices are defined career paths (58%) and succession plans (57%), which indicates more of a focus on short term Career & Succession Management rather than pursuing a long-term strategy.
About the Career & Succession Management Report
The Career & Succession Management Report is the third in a series of reports on HR practices. It is based on the findings of the Top Employers Institute’s HR Best Practices Survey, surveying a sample size of 600 certified organizations in 96 countries with more than 3.000 employees each.
The global HR Best Practices Survey assesses an organization’s HR environment in the areas of: strategy, policy implementation, monitoring and communication of employee conditions and development. The Top Employers Institute globally certifies excellence in the conditions that employers create for their people. More than 960 Top Employers were successfully certified in 2015.