Career and Succession Management for Automotive
Named backups for the roles that cannot be vacant.
What this looks like in automotive
The parts of career and succession management that are specific to this sector, rather than general.
Career Routes Across the Group
Movement between plant, dealership and workshop as a retention lever.
What this coversHide
Career Routes Across the Group
Movement between plant, dealership and workshop as a retention lever.
What this coversHideAutomotive groups hold several career ladders that rarely connect. A service advisor with ten years of customer knowledge has no visible route into anything else, so they move to a competitor instead.
Within function
- Technician to senior technician to workshop supervisor
- Sales executive to team lead to showroom manager
- Operator to line lead to production supervisor
Across function
- Workshop to service management
- Sales to customer experience or training
- Plant quality to dealership technical support
We map cross-function moves explicitly and identify successors for every dealership principal, workshop manager and shift in-charge - the roles where an unplanned exit costs most.
The general method — what career and succession management covers, the questions it answers and what an engagement produces — is the same whatever the sector, and is set out on the succession and leadership development page. What is above is the part that differs for automotive.
Other HR topics for automotive
Where to start
Most engagements begin with a review of how this runs in your business today, then a written process and the sequence to implement it.