If you are an SAP SuccessFactors Performance & Goals customer using the Career Development Lite (CDP Lite) functionality, it’s important to know SAP has announced the depreciation of that feature in the second half 2020 SAP SuccessFactors release. That means CDP Lite will become read-only, and you will not be able to create new goals.
SAP suggests the following options for customers using CDP Lite as detailed in this SAP Community blog:
- If you already own the Succession and Development functionality, we recommend you enable the Full Career Development Plan functionality asap. No other action is needed as your existing development plan will continue to work when Full CDP is enabled.
- If you do not own the Succession and Development functionality, but you do own Goal Management, we recommend you set up a development plan using the Goal Management functionality. Following the steps outlined in the Migration Document attached below.
- If you do not own Succession and Development or Goal Management, you will need to purchase licenses in order to continue to capture development goals.
As SAP notes, it is possible to set up goals in the Goal Management module and use that as your new de facto career planning tool. That is the best option if you don’t have the SAP SuccessFactors Succession and Development Planning and aren’t in a position to add it to your HCM landscape.
However, there are many benefits to Succession and Development Planning that you cannot achieve with just goal management, and they go far beyond what you could do with CDP Lite. With the full modules, you’ll find greater integration with SAP SuccessFactors Performance Management and Learning, as well as offer greater transparency to employees as to how their skills and competencies match potential career paths.
Let’s look at what a complete Career Development Planning setup enables within SAP SuccessFactors Succession Management and Career Development.
A More Integrated Career Development Experience
SAP SuccessFactors Succession Management offers you the ability to ensure all critical roles within the organization will be filled, providing a safety net for the organization should employees leave. This could include Talent Pools, which allow you to identify key cohorts of talent within the organization.
Succession Planning from SAP SuccessFactors also provides benefits for employees by signaling long term stability for the organization but also identifying the next generation of leaders.
With an integrated Succession Planning and Career Development process, you can then match development plans for employees to the roles that they expect to fulfill in the future.
This mapping highlights clearly where the employee may have potential development needs, but also maybe some hidden strengths or blind spots in their competence. The employee could then browse for other roles in the organization that they may have an interest in or aspire to work towards to benchmark themselves against that role. We could also suggest Career Paths to that employee based upon their desired role.
Armed with this information, the employee can then go on to build out their development plan linked to the specific competencies they are working on improving. From an organizational perspective, we are now capturing data around the most common competencies being developed, allowing us to see where we need to invest in building our learning content to meet employee demand and invest wisely.
With the employee’s development goals in place, we can then use the Learning Catalogue to suggest learning to the employee-specific to the competencies that they want to develop so that only relevant activities are in place. This could include learning paths or programs that have a variety of formal learning and on the job activities or coaching and mentoring.
Making the Best of CDP Lite Depreciation
It’s understandable if CDP Lite depreciation will cause some issues for your organization. There is certainly a transition period, but ultimately enabling full Career Development Planning will not only benefit your employees but the organization as a whole.
For help with making this transition, reach out to our Rizing HCM team.
Also, for insight on managing the SAP SuccessFactors releases, watch our on-demand webcast “Setting your Release Management Strategy for the new SAP SuccessFactors Release Schedule.”