Succession Planning – Link Trainers
Why is succession planning important?
Succession planning enhances staff career opportunities, ensuring that our staff have the right skills, experience and knowledge to fill our roles in the future. This is vital to sustaining quality care and service delivery in an increasingly competitive jobs market.
It is not just about moving people along a career ladder. Good succession planning supports individuals along their journey with a variety of training methods including, shadowing, work experience, coaching and mentoring.
The first step to succession planning is to understand our employee competencies and identifying any areas for focus. We also pay attention to what our regulators are looking for in more frequent and better training to improve the care delivery for the sector. This ensures staff have the correct skills, knowledge and behaviours to carry this out in practice.
How do we identify individuals and opportunity?
Within our care home group, we have many Home Trainers that do a superb job and would like the opportunity to progress further into learning and development roles. It can be a big step from Home Trainer to Regional Training Officer, so we felt it would be beneficial to implement a recognised midway career stage to help Home Trainers progress successfully within their personal development. We consulted with our Home Managers to identify a core group of outstanding Home Trainers who were enthusiastic and motivated to advance their careers and become a Link Trainer.
Development plans
After identifying potential Link Trainers, they are all assigned a Mentor. Together, they discuss the role and assess their current skills to meet the role requirements and support any areas as necessary. Together, they then draw up a development plan for that individual.
What does a Link Trainer do?
Link Trainers are constantly working to upskill and improve their knowledge and practice to support the Regional Training Officers, particularly in services that require help or those that do not currently have an internal Home Trainer. They are instrumental in supporting the Training Team and also attend internal and external training days to develop their capabilities and competencies. Both our care homes and the Training Team recognise the Link Trainers for all their hard work and dedication and we look forward to recruiting more Home Trainers who wish to pursue this career opportunity in the future.
Anyone that would like to be considered as a future Link Trainer should contact their Regional Training Officer to discuss this further.
Article by Shelley Parker-Wain, Learning & Development Director, for Welcome Home Issue 11.
Read more about being a Link Trainer in our Career Transition article and see our current available roles on our Avery careers website.
