Start your journey to accountancy exam success here today

Related Articles

image thumbnail

Stimulating career progression: succession planning

Mar 04, 2015

Share This

We often hear from our clients an expression of the desire to stimulate career progression. On further probing this tends to boil down to one of two aims: either creating the aptitude and desire for ongoing learning and development; or providing a pathway, usually aligned to accountancy qualifications, that maps to internal career opportunities.

The wealth of accountancy qualifications (AAT, ACCA, CIMA, ACA etc.) clearly provide such frameworks upon which to base those accredited pathways. They can certainly take the right individuals from the purchase ledger to director; but they will not, on their own, guarantee a successful talent succession strategy.

So, in addition to establishing qualification pathways, we believe that employers need to embrace the following three principles in order to stimulate career progression:

  1. Communicate
  2. Mentor
  3. Celebrate

Communicate: tell your employees where they are, show them what the career progression pathway looks like, and set out clearly what they have to do to move up.

Mentor: assign employees further up in the career progression structure to work with ‘trainees’ (in its broadest sense of those engaged in work-relevant learning) and pass on their experiences and skills.

Celebrate: recognise the achievements of your employees who gain qualifications and promotions.

Of course, we cannot guarantee that by following these principles you will automatically stimulate career progression within your workforce overnight. But, certainly, of the many employers we go and talk to – and, more importantly, listen to – it is consistently those with well defined pathways that involve all levels of staff, are well published and celebrate achievement, who realise the best returns on their efforts. 



Category: