Succession Planning & Talent Retention
Most organisations discover their succession gap on the day a resignation letter arrives from someone who cannot be replaced in ninety days. This one-day programme is built to happen before that. Participants identify their critical roles and key-person risks, run a talent review that produces honest ratings rather than flattering ones, build development plans for named successors, and work out which retention levers matter for the people they most want to keep. The output is a filled-in succession map for their own department, not a framework to implement later.
Programme Agenda
Critical Roles and Key-Person Risk
Identifying the roles where a departure causes disproportionate damage, which are often not the most senior ones. Scoring roles on impact and replaceability, and finding the undocumented knowledge that sits in one person's head.
Talent Review Without the Politics
Running a nine-box review on performance and potential, defining potential in observable terms, and the traps: rewarding loyalty as potential, confusing current performance with future capability, and letting the loudest manager set the ratings.
Building the Pipeline
Ready now, ready in one to two years, ready later. Naming successors per critical role, identifying roles with no viable internal successor, and deciding honestly where you will have to hire externally instead of pretending a pipeline exists.
Development Plans That Actually Develop
Stretch assignments, acting roles, project leadership, cross-functional exposure and structured mentoring. Why classroom training alone rarely closes a readiness gap, and how to fund development that competes with day-job pressure.
What Really Drives Retention
Why exit interviews systematically underreport the real reason. Manager quality, career visibility, workload, recognition and pay, and how to find out which of these is biting in your organisation using stay interviews and attrition data.
Retention Levers You Can Actually Pull
Building targeted retention plans for high-risk, high-impact people. Career conversations that do not promise what you cannot deliver, internal mobility, counter-offer policy, and the retention interventions that reliably backfire.
Knowledge Transfer and Handover
Capturing process knowledge, relationships and judgement before someone leaves. Documentation that gets used, shadowing and overlap periods, and running a handover on a short notice period.
Workshop: Your Succession Map
Participants complete a critical role register, a nine-box placement for their own team, named successors with readiness levels and gaps, and a retention action list for their highest-risk people. Peer review and facilitator challenge on the gaps left blank.
Learning Outcomes:
Identify critical roles and quantify key-person risk in your area
Run a nine-box talent review that produces honest ratings
Name successors per critical role with an assessed readiness level
Build development plans that close readiness gaps through real work
Find the actual retention drivers behind your attrition numbers
Design targeted retention plans for high-risk, high-impact people
Run a knowledge transfer and handover before capability walks out
Duration: 1 Day (8 Hours)
Training Hours: 9:00 AM to 5:00 PM
Level: Intermediate
Training Mode: Physical, Online, or Hybrid
HRD Corp SBL-KHAS Claimable
Certificate of Completion included