Succession Planning - Ensuring a sustainable talent pipeline

During last week's UIC World Congress on rail training (WCRT) in Paris, our Global Director, Heiko Scholz, gave a presentation on succession planning to an international audience of HR and training managers from 30 countries. He began by explaining Deutsche Bahn's succession planning system, which won the St. Gallen Leadership Award and was introduced in 2019. Its focus is on the structured identification of critical functions and on an annual nomination and calibration process. The system has helped Deutsche Bahn reduce the staffing process from 60 days to 5 days. Almost 5,000 potential successors for 1,500 positions have now been identified. Of these, 79% were self-nominated.

In the second part of the presentation, he explained how DB Rail Academy implements such processes for international customers. Using the Saudi Railway Company as an example, he showed how 3 management levels were assessed in detail, competency gaps with regard to the target position were systematically reduced with individual development plans, regularly reviewed and finally closed.

To see the presentation slides, please click here.