Amazon succession plan

Evaluate Amazon’s current career and succession planning process

For years, Amazon has been known to be the monster of business operations in the industry. As employees go through Amazon’s employment process and circulate through their fast moving and massive turnover, Amazon’s career planning process seemed non-existence. Employees were continuously placed into the company’s performance improvement program (PIP). As they go through the PIP, employees knew their days were numbered at Amazon. Employees knew that their chances at enhancing their careers to be included in the upper management succession planning or let alone remaining in employment were close to none (Kim, 2017).

In order to ensure proper career succession and improved overall work culture, Amazon took the proper steps towards improving their employee status. First step towards career improvement that Amazon took was creating a fast track career enhancement and management preparation program: Pathways. In Pathways, new graduates are able to start a career in the lower management position to gain on the job experience and enhance their skills to grow within the company (Pathways – My Amazon Job, 2017). In Pathways, employees start at a lower level managerial position as an area manager. An area manager leads a group of 80-300 employee when they learn all the necessary skills to prepare them for the operations manager, senior operations manager and eventually directorship position (Pathways – My Amazon Job, 2017).

Along with Pathways, Amazon replaced its performance improvement program with a new career enhancement program, Pivot, for underperforming employees (Kim, 2017). Pivot aims at identifying employees with low performance and giving them three options that would allow them to take a personal decision towards growth or external placement. The options that a Pivot employee receives are: resigning with a severance package, appeal the placement or working with a career ambassador (Kim, 2017).

As Amazon enhances its career enhancement process, it builds an environment ready for an overall succession plan. The current succession plan in place for Amazon’s executive members has been and will remain a secret until it’s decided otherwise. On multiple interviews with Amazon’s founder, Jeff Bezos, the question of succession planning was brought up. However, Bezos continuously replied that a plan is indeed in place; a secret plan (Mac, 2016). The secret plan can be guessed by observing the most recent executive changes one can identify the possible entities in the succession plan. Recently, two new company heads were named CEOs: Jeff Wilke for Worldwide Consumer and Andy Jassy for Amazon Web Services (Mac, 2016). As they both take their new roles, it is without a doubt a step towards revealing Amazon’s secretive succession plan.

References

Kim, E. (2017). Amazon just launched a new training program to help employees in danger of being fired. Business Insider. Retrieved from http://www.businessinsider.com/amazon-launches-pivot-program-help-employees-in-danger-of-being-fired-2017-1

Mac, R. (2016). After Jeff Bezos Hands Out Promotions, Amazon Now Has Three CEOs. Forbes.com. Retrieved from https://www.forbes.com/sites/ryanmac/2016/04/07/jeff-bezos-ceos-andy-jassy-jeff-wilke-amazon/#4decc95527a4

Pathways - My Amazon Job. (2017). Myamazonjob.com. Retrieved from https://myamazonjob.com/student-opportunities/pathways

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