GE Aerospace's chief human resources officer has made a direct case that companies should treat expertise succession as seriously as they treat leadership succession — a shift that would change how talent pipelines, knowledge transfer and workforce planning get built at large employers.

The argument, laid out in an interview with People Matters, challenges a long-standing imbalance in people processes. Most succession planning concentrates on the C-suite and senior management layers. Critical technical and institutional knowledge — held by engineers, specialists and long-tenured operators — often walks out the door without a documented handoff. For a company like GE Aerospace, whose products depend on deep engineering mastery, that gap carries operational and safety implications, not just organizational ones.

The CHRO's framing gives HR leaders a concrete agenda item: audit which roles hold expertise the business cannot easily replace, and build succession mechanisms for those positions that mirror the rigor applied to executive pipelines. That includes identifying at-risk knowledge, pairing experts with successors, and creating structured transfer before retirement or attrition forces the issue.

The timing matters. Demographic pressure is sharpening the problem across manufacturing and engineering-heavy sectors, where experienced workers are retiring faster than employers can develop replacements. HR functions that treat expertise loss as a slow-motion risk — rather than an acute one — may find the gap between leadership bench strength and technical bench strength widening.

For people-process owners, the practical questions are straightforward. Does your succession planning software and process cover non-leadership critical roles? Do managers have incentives to document and share knowledge held by individual contributors? Is expertise risk part of workforce planning reviews, or does it surface only after a departure?

The GE Aerospace position suggests the answer at many employers is still no — and that closing the gap between leadership succession and expertise succession is becoming a board-level workforce conversation.