Succession Plans Hold Up When They Measure Trajectory Alongside Readiness
Readiness tells us whether someone can do the job we have today. Trajectory tells us whether they can grow with the job and do what we're going to need tomorrow.
Chelsea Fryman
Manager, Human Resources Consultant
Aerospace & Defense Industry
Succession plans rank people against a role as it stands on the day the plan is written. Readiness is the measure nearly every plan uses, because a manager can check a candidate against the duties already listed in the job description. The assessment holds if the role stays as written until it becomes vacant. However, technology, customer demands, and reorganizations move roles faster than that, leaving the plan describing a job that’s changed significantly by the time someone fills it.
Chelsea Fryman is a Manager and Human Resources Consultant working in organizational design and effectiveness in the aerospace and defense industry. She holds a SHRM-SCP certification and has spent more than twenty years advising executives across engineering, technology, finance, manufacturing, and consulting. Fryman’s work covers organizational design, workforce planning, leadership effectiveness, and post-acquisition integration across a global workforce. She also founded DisruptHR Colorado Springs, a live event series for HR and business leaders.
“Readiness tells us whether someone can do the job we have today. Trajectory tells us whether they can grow with the job and do what we’re going to need tomorrow,” says Fryman. Both measures draw from the same candidate pool, but produce different shortlists. Readiness rewards the person who knows the current processes and holds the right certifications. Trajectory looks for evidence that someone has already carried a role into territory it hadn’t covered before.
Ready for which job?
Succession planning runs on a multi-year horizon by design, since the point is to have someone prepared before the seat opens. The only version of the role available to a planner is the one that exists in the here and now. Everything about the future version is an assumption the plan doesn’t surface. “If you’re planning succession for a role in 2028 or 2030, it’s not going to be the same role that it is today,” says Fryman. “It’s going to change inherently.”
In Fryman’s experience, most companies review job descriptions every five years at best, and few revisit them annually. Regulation requires the documents to exist, and sets no schedule for updating them. A succession cycle running in between rates people on a description that has gone unchecked for years. “We get set on a track of asking, ‘What is this person doing now that makes them ready?'” she explains. “They can do the job as it sits today.”
Many succession reviews sort people into timed readiness bands, gauging whether an employee is ready now, ready in six to twelve months, and ready in twelve to eighteen months. Each label answers when someone will be ready, without asking what they will be ready for. “They’re ready now, but twelve months from now the role is going to change,” notes Fryman. “Maybe only 20% of it, but that’s a good chunk of change when you’re looking at a big role like a VP role.”
Single points of failure
In some roles, an employee holds knowledge that exists nowhere else. A program’s history, the reasoning behind a particular design, or a technical method may go undocumented, known only to the person doing the work. Fryman sees a role in that condition as a critical failure. “We absolutely have to have succession,” says Fryman. “We cannot have a single point failure for certain things.”
A retirement wave is now moving experienced people out, and those who remain change jobs more often than they did a decade ago. Defense work concentrates that risk, since a single program can run for years on expertise held by a handful of people. A resignation can arrive with too little notice to transfer what the person knows. “If this person leaves, if they win the lottery, if they get another job offer that offers them double the salary, they’re going to bail out,” adds Fryman. “What do we lose at that point in time?”
Writing down what one person knows works for a narrow set of roles. Fryman separates the positions where continuity is the only requirement from the larger group of program leads, managers, and engineers. Knowing the current job well is the smaller part of what those roles ask. “They can run that program now, they’ve got the clearance, they’ve got the technology, they can do it,” explains Fryman. “But that is going to change.”
Growth as retention
Preparing people for roles that haven’t settled means building skills that transfer when the role changes. Fryman starts with cross-functional exposure, since an employee who only sees their own function sometimes doesn’t see what the rest of the business needs. She’s clear that this means understanding another function, without retraining into it. “A business leader working with HR functionality is great, because it gives them a little bit of the people skills,” notes Fryman. “An HR person working with business is going to give you more of the operations type of skills.”
Development also gives people a reason to stay. BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index maps satisfaction against tenure and finds a U-curve. New hires sit at an eNPS of 51 and long-tenured employees at 57, while the two-to-three-year cohort bottoms out at 33. The report describes that stretch as the “disillusionment years,” when the honeymoon’s over and loyalty hasn’t yet formed. One recommendation is development designed around a specific career stage. “People want to expand their skills. They want to learn something new,” says Fryman. “They have ambitions, they have desires, even to the extent that they want to make a little bit more money.”
Fryman distinguishes development that serves the company’s next requirement from development that widens what a person can do. Training someone on a new system keeps them useful in the role they hold, while broader exposure lets them move with the role as it changes. The difference shows up in what a succession review asks about a candidate. “I’d add a question that goes beyond continuity and is more future facing,” concludes Fryman. “How is this role likely to change, and can the successor make those adjustments with it?”
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TL;DR
Chelsea Fryman
Aerospace & Defense Industry
Manager, Human Resources Consultant
Manager, Human Resources Consultant
Succession plans rank people against a role as it stands on the day the plan is written. Readiness is the measure nearly every plan uses, because a manager can check a candidate against the duties already listed in the job description. The assessment holds if the role stays as written until it becomes vacant. However, technology, customer demands, and reorganizations move roles faster than that, leaving the plan describing a job that’s changed significantly by the time someone fills it.
Chelsea Fryman is a Manager and Human Resources Consultant working in organizational design and effectiveness in the aerospace and defense industry. She holds a SHRM-SCP certification and has spent more than twenty years advising executives across engineering, technology, finance, manufacturing, and consulting. Fryman’s work covers organizational design, workforce planning, leadership effectiveness, and post-acquisition integration across a global workforce. She also founded DisruptHR Colorado Springs, a live event series for HR and business leaders.
“Readiness tells us whether someone can do the job we have today. Trajectory tells us whether they can grow with the job and do what we’re going to need tomorrow,” says Fryman. Both measures draw from the same candidate pool, but produce different shortlists. Readiness rewards the person who knows the current processes and holds the right certifications. Trajectory looks for evidence that someone has already carried a role into territory it hadn’t covered before.
Ready for which job?
Succession planning runs on a multi-year horizon by design, since the point is to have someone prepared before the seat opens. The only version of the role available to a planner is the one that exists in the here and now. Everything about the future version is an assumption the plan doesn’t surface. “If you’re planning succession for a role in 2028 or 2030, it’s not going to be the same role that it is today,” says Fryman. “It’s going to change inherently.”
In Fryman’s experience, most companies review job descriptions every five years at best, and few revisit them annually. Regulation requires the documents to exist, and sets no schedule for updating them. A succession cycle running in between rates people on a description that has gone unchecked for years. “We get set on a track of asking, ‘What is this person doing now that makes them ready?'” she explains. “They can do the job as it sits today.”
Many succession reviews sort people into timed readiness bands, gauging whether an employee is ready now, ready in six to twelve months, and ready in twelve to eighteen months. Each label answers when someone will be ready, without asking what they will be ready for. “They’re ready now, but twelve months from now the role is going to change,” notes Fryman. “Maybe only 20% of it, but that’s a good chunk of change when you’re looking at a big role like a VP role.”
Single points of failure
In some roles, an employee holds knowledge that exists nowhere else. A program’s history, the reasoning behind a particular design, or a technical method may go undocumented, known only to the person doing the work. Fryman sees a role in that condition as a critical failure. “We absolutely have to have succession,” says Fryman. “We cannot have a single point failure for certain things.”
A retirement wave is now moving experienced people out, and those who remain change jobs more often than they did a decade ago. Defense work concentrates that risk, since a single program can run for years on expertise held by a handful of people. A resignation can arrive with too little notice to transfer what the person knows. “If this person leaves, if they win the lottery, if they get another job offer that offers them double the salary, they’re going to bail out,” adds Fryman. “What do we lose at that point in time?”
Writing down what one person knows works for a narrow set of roles. Fryman separates the positions where continuity is the only requirement from the larger group of program leads, managers, and engineers. Knowing the current job well is the smaller part of what those roles ask. “They can run that program now, they’ve got the clearance, they’ve got the technology, they can do it,” explains Fryman. “But that is going to change.”
Growth as retention
Preparing people for roles that haven’t settled means building skills that transfer when the role changes. Fryman starts with cross-functional exposure, since an employee who only sees their own function sometimes doesn’t see what the rest of the business needs. She’s clear that this means understanding another function, without retraining into it. “A business leader working with HR functionality is great, because it gives them a little bit of the people skills,” notes Fryman. “An HR person working with business is going to give you more of the operations type of skills.”
Development also gives people a reason to stay. BambooHR’s 2026 Employee Happiness Index maps satisfaction against tenure and finds a U-curve. New hires sit at an eNPS of 51 and long-tenured employees at 57, while the two-to-three-year cohort bottoms out at 33. The report describes that stretch as the “disillusionment years,” when the honeymoon’s over and loyalty hasn’t yet formed. One recommendation is development designed around a specific career stage. “People want to expand their skills. They want to learn something new,” says Fryman. “They have ambitions, they have desires, even to the extent that they want to make a little bit more money.”
Fryman distinguishes development that serves the company’s next requirement from development that widens what a person can do. Training someone on a new system keeps them useful in the role they hold, while broader exposure lets them move with the role as it changes. The difference shows up in what a succession review asks about a candidate. “I’d add a question that goes beyond continuity and is more future facing,” concludes Fryman. “How is this role likely to change, and can the successor make those adjustments with it?”