Abstract:
Employee retention is vital in higher education industry since job replacement is complicated and
competition to maintain skilled staff seems to be a daunting task. Even though, employee turnover is inevitable,
succession planning ensures that employee turnover does not adversely affect the organization. The justification
for the study is developed from the lack of retention studies in Sri Lankan private universities. The reason to
conduct the study at the chosen pirate university is due to the existing issue of employee turnover and the adverse
consequences faced by them. Therefore, study conducted with the sample of 50 executive level employees in the
private university by using the simple random sampling technique. Primary data was collected through printed
questionnaire to gain quantitative data by following a deductive approach. Quantitative data was analyzed using
descriptive statistics such as mean and standard deviation and presented using charts, graphs and tables. The
independent variables are career development, successor’s appropriateness and top management commitment.
The finding of the current research study revealed that career development has a significant impact on employee
retention at the university based on the correlation and regression analysis. The critical challenges identified as
difficulties in growth opportunities, no effective communication about career paths and progression, no
transparency in promoting employee and departmental heads are not consulted when selecting the successors. The
study also recommends to document the succession planning and have individual conversation with employees to
identify their career paths, encouraged to improve its communication of information across all divisions, to
develop a transparent internal talent search system and to encourage employees to discuss the realistic job
previews of positions and career paths with manager in the private university. Theoretically and practically the
study filled the gap of investigating on retaining employees through succession planning in Sri Lankan private
university.
