Home » Blog » Identifying your key roles and assess the skills, knowledge and aspirations of your employees.

In our last blog we talked about Succession Planning and why doing it helps you plan future staffing needs, and the people with the skills and potential to fulfil these needs.

We also discussed that it can create a culture of career growth and development, which helps to both motivate and retain your existing staff.

So now you know why you need to do it, the next step is to get started, and you can do this by identifying your key roles and potential successors for these roles.

Your key roles are those that are critical to your business’s operational activities and strategic objectives.  Those that if left vacant, would make it difficult to achieve your current and future business goals, and those that if left vacant could be detrimental to the health, safety and security of your business and employees.

You can do this by identifying the knowledge, skills, abilities and competencies needed to achieve your business goals.

Next you need to understand who has the potential to fill these key roles (or parts of them), along with who is interested in doing so.

So, you need to talk to your employees to understand their career plans, what interests them and the skills, knowledge and competencies they already possess.  Bear in mind, that this may be a new concept to some, they may not have considered this before, and despite the potential you may see in them, it might not align with their personal aspirations or their current circumstances.

Also, remember that the employee could have skills obtained in previous employment, which may be useful to your business.

Once you have information relating to key roles, your employee’s aspirations and an awareness of the skills and knowledge you already have in your business, you can start to build up your succession plans.

Identify who may be able to move into, cover or take on certain parts of your key roles, along with the development, knowledge transfer and exposure they may need to do this.

Lastly you need to evaluate and monitor your succession planning to ensure that it’s effective.  You can do this by checking how quickly key positions are filled and how effectively new employees operate.

Other Articles

Do you know how to structure a probationary period? Flexible working in 2024 – what’s new? Summer is over, how do you keep your employees motivated?