Succession planning has become a critical issue and determining factor in overall organizational success. With many top level and middle managers as well as employees in technical fields leaving the workforce in recent years, organizations are reporting increasing shortage of qualified replacements. Additionally, there are an increasing number of companies experiencing difficulties in filling key positions. This is compounded by their tremendous growth as well as the rise in organizations now stressing a performance-driven culture. The result is a corporate talent management environment with many challenges.
Now is the time for formulating a plan of action that provides automated solutions for your company's
ever-changing workforce. The LearnCenter platform's built-in AbilityUtilityฎ feature set will help build a knowledge repository, identify the best candidates to fill each position, and ascertain what skills are required and who has them. This user friendly feature provides the functionality and capability needed to achieve your succession-oriented, workforce management goals.
Your succession plan should ensure that your more experienced employees can share their knowledge with their co-workers. There are innovative technologies that can assist with the transfer of knowledge from your most experienced workforce segment that are unique to the AbilityUtility feature set within the LearnCenter platform.
Built on Learn.coms award-winning Learning Management System (LMS) technology, the
LearnCenterฎ platform from Learn.com has evolved over the past five years through practical application feedback from clients, our own vision, and industry analysis to become the world's first talent management suite to realize the complete synchronization of the entire employee lifecycle;
from pre-hire to retire.
How important is an effective succession planning initiative?
| | The U.S. will face a 10 million worker shortage in 2010. |
| | The 500 largest companies will lose 50% of their senior management in 5 years. |
| | 70% of companies report moderate to severe leadership shortages. |
| | Unemployment for U.S. workers with a graduate degree is under 2%. |
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| | The average same employer tenure for U.S. employees is 3 years. For 18-24 year-olds, it is 18 months. |
| | Replacement costs for management level positions can exceed 150% of annual salary. |
| | 60% of internal recruiters plan to "significantly increase" use of social networking technology to target passive candidates |
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The LearnCenter platform empowers organizations to:
| | Evaluate leader competency against organizational standards and peer groups. |
| | Create valid certification programs. |
| | Manage certifications for individuals by measuring their skills against defined skill sets for a particular certification. |
| | Execute succession planning by using skill-gap reporting to identify the best matches for openings in the organization |
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| | Manage job profiles and the required skills and recommended learning plans for each job profile. |
| | Create customized learning plans based on training and development needs for each individual, and track those plans against completion timelines or deficiencies within performance reviews. |
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Developing Critical Talent from Within
Today's forward-thinking organizations are re-evaluating their strategies for building the workforce and are establishing better practices for acquiring and developing talent. These efforts are undertaken to keep skilled employees longer, avoid the risk of vacant mission-critical positions, decrease training costs, and reduce or eliminate hiring cycles.
The benefits and rewards of a well-designed and strategically executed talent management strategy are already apparent, according to a study by Aberdeen Group and the Human Capital Institute (HCI) of more than 165 organizations. It found that companies mastering the human capital capabilities they consider critical to their success achieve about 45 percent higher workforce productivity and almost 40 percent higher revenue generation over their peers. To support these strategies, companies are adopting enterprise talent management solutions to make the process easier to implement, manage and measure.
When creating a succession plan, an organization needs visibility into:
| | Who has the skills and experience to qualify now for management/C-level positions? |
| | How do candidates rank in their current and previous performance reviews? |
| | How were they rated by their manager on "promotion readiness" during the performance review? |
| | Employee progress reports |
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| | Who has some qualifications now, and through a development plan, can build the necessary skills and competencies to fill the role? |
| | Which employees have indicated interest in becoming manager or director on their career plan? |
| | Is it possible a person not "on the radar" could make a lateral move that would benefit the company? |
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The LearnCenter Platform: A Holistic Approach to Succession Planning
From a technology standpoint, a succession-planning solution should be part of an overall talent management suite that favors a holistic approach to career and development planning, learning management, performance management and succession management. To meet current and future needs, a talent management solution must work as a unified, holistic solution, not as a collection of separate modules.
The holistic, homogeneous LearnCenter platform enables organizations to develop an effective succession planning strategy by addressing:
Organizational Planning |
| | Management can track the progress of its organization's strategic objectives, ensure daily operations align with corporate objectives, and determine who the rising stars are-and who needs help. |
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Employee Planning |
| | Determine if an employee is on track to meet current performance goals, if their career is moving forward, what opportunities for learning and professional growth will help their career, and what steps the employees can take to ensure success. |
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Evaluation |
| | Establish if an employee is meeting performance expectations and if there are any gaps between performance and job requirements. |
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Action and Improvement |
| | Decide on specific development activities to increase employee potential and improve overall workforce performance as well as opportunities for professional growth. |
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Major succession planning functions within the LearnCenter platform include:
| | Skill gap reports |
| | Job profile gap reports |
| | Best match reports |
| | Department heads can maintain communities of practice |
| | Centralize departmental reports, presentations and best practices |
| | Track candidates and provide necessary interventions |
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| | Employee progress reports |
| | Blogging tools |
| | Collaboration in real time, virtual meetings, chat, and bulletin boards |
| | Analytics |
| | Clear business intelligence |
| | Wiki tools |
| | Create WebRooms of data |
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