Career Mobility: Future Skills & Workforce Planning

In this issue of the Career Mobility Newsletter, we will explore Future Skills and Workforce Planning which is the fifth element of my Career Mobility model below:

Workforce Planning Definition

Workforce planning is the process of leveraging data to ensure that a business’s workforce supports business needs, goals, and strategic plans.?By utilizing workforce planning, businesses can set themselves up for success and empower their HR department to make more informed decisions about their talent needs.?Christin Organ – Forbes Advisor

Benefits of Workforce Planning

In this Forbes Advisor article, Christin outlines the benefits of workforce planning:

• Creating a roadmap for achieving business goals
• Preparing for the future
• Discovering staffing gaps or opportunities for increased efficiency
• Providing data to support HR decisions
• Facilitating succession planning
• Improving retention rates

According to the SHRM article “Practicing the Discipline of Workforce Planning”, an organization’s business plan needs to address not only financial requirements to meet plan goals and objectives but also the appropriate workforce mix.?With workforce planning, an organization assesses its workforce and determines what actions must be taken to respond to future needs.?The actions taken may depend upon external or internal factors which determine how future needs will be met by recruiting, training, or by outsourcing the work.

Workforce planning involves working through these four issues:

The workforce required to strategically position the organization to address its possible future and business objectives

• The gaps between the future model and the existing organization, including any special skills
• The recruiting and training plans that must be put in place to close those gaps
• The determination of external sources needed to meet skills or processes to be outsourced

Workforce planning is not just a tool to anticipate employment needs, it also can be used for staff training and development as well as succession planning.

Roles of HR and Senior Management in Workforce Planning

The HR department is usually responsible for the majority of workforce planning although senior leaders responsible for organizational strategy, including the COO and CFO may be involved.?Leaders should evaluate whether the plan will effectively anticipate and address future organizational needs for sound business decision-making.

According to SHRM, HR professionals responsible for leading workforce planning should:

• Designate a specific member of the HR team to manage the process
• Identify a high-level executive to champion the plan
• Engage key stakeholders in the workforce planning process
• Align the plan with the organization’s strategic business plan
• Coordinate the plan with succession planning and career development initiatives

Workforce planning should be a continuous activity with ongoing evaluation of changes in both the internal and external environment that will impact the organization’s staffing needs.

Steps in the Workforce Planning Process

In this Indeed Career Guide, Lotus Buckner identifies steps to follow in workforce planning:

1. Determine the organization’s strategic direction – review the objectives, business plans, and key performance indicators and analyze specific requirements for talent, including employee responsibilities based upon these.?Consider changes to staffing associated with attrition or company growth.
2. Conduct a supply and demand analysis – analyze the internal and external supply of talent.?Evaluate your current employees and their capabilities and compare them with your current organizational needs and success.?Determine the feasibility of hiring new employees.?Consider what skills, qualifications, and attributes are key to achieving the business’s primary goals. Reflect on what’s necessary to compete in your markets and how to enable productivity, efficiency, and innovation.
3. Perform a gap analysis – evaluate your assessments to identify any potential gaps.?Consider how current employee skills align with your objectives. Compare their capabilities with future requirements.?Identify any specific skills gaps or roles the business may want to fill.?Note any skills training requirements for existing employees.
4. Develop and implement solutions – based upon your assessment, determine the appropriate solution.?Evaluate whether providing additional training for your current workforce would satisfy organizational needs.?You could consider redeployment if their current roles are no longer needed.?Determine if you need to hire more employees, research your financial options, and prepare to recruit.
5. Monitor your solution – continue to monitor the effectiveness of your strategies and determine if they close the gaps. ?Repeat the process as necessary to maintain a sufficient workforce.?Use workforce analytics to measure progress objectively.

Future Skills

According to this World Economic Forum article, greater adoption of technology will mean that in-demand skills across jobs will change, and skills gaps will continue to be high.?For workers that stay in their roles, the share of core skills that will change by 2025 is 40% and 50% of all employees will need reskilling. ?Critical thinking and problem-solving top the list of skills employers believe will grow in prominence.?Newly emerging skills in self-management such as active learning, resilience, stress tolerance, and flexibility. Respondents to the Future of Jobs Survey estimate that around 40% of workers will require reskilling of six months or less.

The top jobs skills for 2025 include:

Workforce Planning Tools

Lotus suggests these common workforce planning tools to better identify employee’s current capabilities and their potential future needs:

• Nine-box grid – outlines an employee’s performance and potential in one model that includes different categories and ranks employees based on performance level by category.
• HR dashboard – inputs data from various systems and centralizes it in one place for automated real-time updates of the organization’s workforce status.
• Compensation and benefits analysis – involves evaluating the benefits an organization provides to its employees based on their performance.
• Strategic workforce planning map – outlines how workforce planning aligns with the larger organizational elements and strategies typically using a flowchart with an ordered list of items and strategies.
• Scenario planning – helps imagine different situations so that the organization can effectively prepare for them in daily operations with their current talent.

More detail is available on these tools in the Additional Resources section of this newsletter.

How to Move From Reactive to Strategic Workforce Planning

In this Visier blog, “HR Future-Proofing vs. Firefighting: 5 Strategic Workforce Planning Tips” the Visier team suggests five workforce planning practices to move up the maturity curve.

HR leaders are often perceived by line managers and senior executives to deliver the most value when they are firefighting (a.k.a. dowsing ‘talent fires’).

Quick HR fixes like filling a vacancy with a pricey new hire may lead to near-term wins but can have a negative long-term impact if they are applied to roles that end up less valuable to the business.?With strategic workforce planning, it is possible to plan ahead and not just react in the rapidly changing business environment.

While many leaders may recognize the need for strategic workforce planning, they may only have the capabilities to plan at an operational level.?Bersin by Deloitte stated that more than half of organizations are only at level one of the workforce planning maturity curve where they are focused on headcount data collection for basic forecasting.?At level three, the focus is more strategic with skills gap resolution and scenario development.?Moving up the maturity curve requires buy-in from finance, HR, and line manager stakeholders.

1. Get actionable – people start to get excited when you deliver actionable information such as planning for a different talent pool if you are trying to drive sales in a new region.
2. Build relationships – it is critical to build relationships with leaders who are key to workforce planning success like HR, Finance, and Corporate Planning.
3. Create a sense of urgency – emphasize to leaders why an up-to-date plan is critical for each area of the organization such as facilities for seating and IT for computers and support staff.
4. Streamline the planning team – at least one person should be the Master Planner and other employees can act as part-time capacity leads.
5. Get ahead of the talent acquisition curve – at the most effective organizations, the workforce plan is so effective and well-communicated that talent acquisition can predict future hiring needs before they receive requisitions.

Additional Resources

The 9 Box Grid:?A Practitioner’s Guide

What is an HR Dashboard & HR Report?

A Guide to Compensation Analysis

Scenario Planning: Types, Steps and Example

Workforce Planning Maturity Model

Please share any thoughts or experiences with readers related to Future Skills and Workforce Planning in the comments section below.

Our next issue will focus on “Upskilling & Reskilling Programs”.