Ask any HR leader what keeps them up at night, and a common answer is: "What happens if a key manager leaves tomorrow?" Organisations that treat career development and succession planning as an occasional HR exercise usually find out the hard way that leadership gaps are expensive, disruptive and slow to fix. This training course from the Arab British Fellowship Training Academy is built for the professionals who are expected to have an answer ready before the question is even asked.

Across the sessions, participants move between two connected disciplines: helping individual employees build meaningful career paths, and building an organisational pipeline of people who are ready to step into critical roles when the time comes. The course is aimed squarely at HR practitioners, people managers and business leaders who want their teams — and their succession plans — to be future-ready rather than reactive.

Who Should Attend?

• HR practitioners and organisational development specialists building career and succession frameworks.
• People managers and team leaders responsible for developing the employees who report to them.
• Business leaders who need the organisation's critical roles covered before they become vacant.
• Anyone moving into a career-development or workforce-planning role.

What You'll Be Able To Do

• Build and run career development plans that align personal ambition with what the organisation actually needs.
• Identify critical roles early, and design leadership pipelines and succession criteria around them.
• Use practical workforce assessment tools to judge performance, potential and readiness for the next step.
• Design retention and engagement strategies that keep high-potential employees from walking out the door.
• Create a learning culture where continuous development is the norm, not a once-a-year training event.
• Tie career and succession planning back to long-term organisational strategy, and measure whether it is working.

Module 1: The Succession Question

• Why leadership gaps are expensive, and why waiting for a resignation to plan for one is too late.
• Identifying which roles in the organisation are genuinely critical.
• Building a sustainable succession planning framework around those roles.

Module 2: Spotting Your Future Leaders

• Methods to evaluate employee performance and potential.
• Readiness assessment for career progression and leadership roles.
• Building leadership pipelines from the assessment data.

Module 3: Career Pathing That Keeps People

• Key elements of an effective, individual career development plan.
• Aligning personal goals with organisational objectives.
• Retention strategies built around meaningful career paths, not just pay.

Module 4: Growing Leaders on Purpose

• Nurturing leadership qualities before someone is promoted into a leadership role.
• Practical approaches to preparing employees for advanced responsibility.
• Customising leadership development to the organisation's actual needs.

Module 5: Making Learning Part of the Culture

• Why continuous learning matters more in modern workplaces than one-off training events.
• Practical steps to foster a culture of development.
• Encouraging employees to take ownership of their own growth.

Module 6: From Individual Plans to Business Strategy

• Integrating succession planning into broader business strategy.
• Measuring whether career development and succession plans are actually working.
• Ensuring the whole system holds up over the long term.