Identifying Key Positions and Skills
A critical step in the process is to specifically identify the key positions that will be targeted in the succession plan. This usually includes management-level positions. It may also include highly specialized jobs that are essential to the company’s ability to meet current or future goals.
Once the positions are identified, clarify what knowledge, experience, training and education, skills, personality traits, and other requirements are for these positions. Then, look at current employees and identify individuals with the potential to fill these key positions. Identify gaps in the skills and experience of current employees and then make a concerted effort to fill those gaps when hiring employees from outside the company.
Step … away … from the keyboard! More than 700 prewritten, legally reviewed job descriptions ready at the click of your mouse. Use as is—or easily modify, save, and print. Pay grades are already attached. Try BLR’s remarkable SmartJobs program at no cost. Click here to learn more.
Identifying High-Potential Employees—10 Key Characteristics
Also critical to the succession plan is the process of identifying employees that will be targeted for training and mentoring so that they will be ready to step into key positions when openings occur. It is helpful to consider these criteria:
- Work history, including progression into more responsible positions, and past experience that might be helpful in a future position
- Job performance over time
- Education and training
- Demonstrated willingness to take initiative on new projects and to suggest new ideas
- Employee’s own interests and career goals
- Personality profile if the company uses this type of assessment
- Ability to get work done and to meet deadlines
- Ability to work as part of team and to motivate others
- Understanding of the company’s products and customers
- Training needs of the employee in order to be ready for more responsible management positions
Once an employee is identified through this process, the next step is to develop an individualized plan for the employee. The best development plans include a mentor relationship with a successful senior manager, cross-training, and project work that provides leadership opportunities for the employee. Even though some classroom training may be appropriate, managers generally learn more relevant skills through observation and practice.
Key Element? Job Descriptions
What’s the basis for all your strategic succession planning? Job descriptions. Current descriptions that clearly specify the current and future requirements of the position.
And what’s the status of your job descriptions? Ready to help with succession planning? ADA-compliant? Essential skills delineated?
Job Descriptions … Critical, Yet All too Easy to Back-Burner
Concerned your job descriptions might not be up to date and compliant? … Actually, with BLR’s new program, they are.
BLR has now released its collection of 500 job descriptions, formerly only available in the classic, but shelf-filling, Job Descriptions Encyclopedia, in a program called SmartJobs on CD. That’s cause for celebration—your job descriptions are a click away from being done.
And we’re talking about virtually all of them, covering every common position in any organization, from receptionist right up to president. They are all there in BLR’s SmartJobs.
Most disliked chore checked off! More than 700 prewritten, legally reviewed job descriptions are ready to go at the click of your mouse. Use as is—or easily modify, save, and print. Pay grades already attached. Try BLR’s remarkable SmartJobs program at no cost.
These are descriptions you can depend on. Our collection has been constantly refined and updated over time, with descriptions revised or added each time the law, technology, or the way business is done changes.
Revised for the ADA, Pay Grades Added
BLR editors have taken apart every one of the 700 descriptions and reassembled them to be ADA-compliant. And now they’ve added pay grades for each job, based on BLR’s annual surveys of exempt and nonexempt compensation, as well as other data.
According to our customers, this is an enormous timesaver, enabling them to make compensation decisions even as they define the position.
SmartJobs also includes an extensive tutorial on setting up a complete job descriptions program, as well as how to encourage participation from all parts of the organization. That includes top management, employees, and any union or other collective-bargaining entity.
Twice-Yearly Updates, No Additional Cost
Very important these days are the updates included in the program as a standard feature—essential at a time of constantly changing laws and yes, emerging technologies. And the cost of the program is extremely reasonable, averaging less than 66 cents per job description … already written, legally reviewed, and ready to adapt or use as-is.
You can evaluate BLR’s SmartJobs at no cost in your office for up to 30 days. Just click here and we’ll be delighted to send it to you.
When identifying high potential employees, how do you account for workers who may have such potential but have lacked opportunity, for whatever reason? And how do you avoid the risk of disparate impact discrimination?