Succession Planning 1

[GregLocock]

Do any of you get involved in this? I have once worked for a company that in theory thought about it, but I left before we got serious.



Cheers

Greg Locock

 

[TheTick]

We're about to get a harsh lesson in this. Our most senior engineer was just incapacitated.

 

[rhodie]

Shouldn't ISO documentation extend to upper management as well? Reading a work instruction for being a CEO sounds pretty cool.

 

[PSE]

I have recently wrapped up involvement on a team going through and revising the engineering group career ladder. The purpose of it is to show advancement paths (technical, managerial etc.) and identify the skills required for each position. This allows the employee to determine what skills may be needed to be eligible for advancement and it allows identification of qualified candidates if needed for succession. We might try to work a mentoring program as well but at the time it was determined to be outside the immediate scope of the project.

In an ironic counter point, just prior to this project I picked up additional support responsibilities on several product lines because of the loss of their engineers. Unfortunately I have to go in "cold" as there was no knowledge base retained. My advantage is that those lines are relatively mature products with experienced operators.

While this ladder does not cover every position and means of advancement within the company it is a good start in covering one of the more critical areas of the business. At the company my brother works for now, one of the first things that got handed to him (within the front of his employee's handbook) was the career ladder documentation going completely up to the top levels.

To the Tick,

I hope the disruptions caused by the incapacitation of your senior engineer can be minimzed and that he/she makes a speedy recovery.

Regards

 

[MTE85DRM]

It my opinion that this will be a real issue in the next decade or two as the baby boomers age older experienced engineers will be retiring and looking for qualified people to take over their positions and perhaps buy out their partnership.

The problem escalates in the fact that the cost between purchasing a major share of a decent engineering company is a lot more than starting one up at least for the experienced professional with a good existing client base and some business skills.

The company I'm with right now is struggling with this problem as the major shareholders are all over 55. It will be interesting to see how this develop over the next 5 years.

 

[pablo02]

My former company spent a lot of effort laying out and improving the career path for engineers who didn't want to pursue management (and for the comapny to retain and reward those outstanding engineers) -- it however quickly became abused by managers who wanted to "reward" their favorites and also later it gave new management types the imputus to layoff highly compensated employees to save a buck... now they're struggling with the loss of their knowledge base...

 

[jmw]

The main problem most management teams have is that they believe in the maxim "no one is indispensible". This may be true if the corrollary is noted that you have to change your expectations of the business (which they never do` they just blame sales or marketing or someone else for the downturn in business or increase in problems)when you "re-structure"/"rationalise" or whatever the current jargon is for reducing the head count. Pardon my cynisism (I hope i spelled that right) but in the old days Schlumberger made it a rule not to put to many of its employees on the same plane. Today, i would think many companies would put all their people on a Zepplin with a box of fireworks if they thought it would solve their head count problems.
Succession planning is not a high priority, it seems to me, from the companies i have worked for or with. Even with such predictables as retirement it seems to come as a shock to realise that Old Joe isn't there any more and that maybe they should've put someone to work with him for the last two years or so of his working life just to try and get some of that indispensible knowledge from him. But they didn't and so back he comes from retirement for a few months (if they admit the problem).