Succession Planning at Private Schools in Addis Ababa

Organizations in any industry benefit from clearly developed succession plans. Succession planning is not as pervasive in schools as it should be. In Ethiopia, teachers are either leaving the teaching profession or move from one school to another and join other occupations every year creating a huge gap in leadership development. To this end, schools and school administrators should proactively plan and incorporate succession planning in their strategy as well as daily operation. Using quantitative data collected from 283 teachers from a total of 3189 teachers in 146 Secondary and Preparatory Schools in Addis Ababa. This research tried to assess the succession planning practices of those private schools. Mean and the standard deviation was used to analyze the participant response while a One-Sample t-test was used to ascertain the statistical significance of the mean values. The result however suggests that succession planning at the sampled schools is done partially with mixed results. Even though participants accept the importance of succession planning, they indicated that talent identification and talent development are not done properly. The retention of talent however is done relatively well. It is therefore recommended that private schools in Addis Ababa introduce a proper succession planning program and make sure mechanisms of talent identification, development, and retention in place.