What Is Workforce Planning?
Workforce Planning is the process businesses go through to establish what people and skills they need, and will need in the future, in order to determine the right talent strategy for today.
The plan defines who, and how, and when, employees should be hired, upskilled or redeployed, as well as how and when this happens, and how these employees should work, based on the needs of the organization.
Once a company has a business plan, and some idea of how they will achieve it, the workforce plan constitutes the “people” side. There will also be plans for technology, for processes, for operations and offices; there will be financial plans and marketing strategies.
But as leaders start to realize that every business challenge is essentially a talent challenge, creating better workforce plans is becoming a top priority.
The demise of Workforce Planning 💀
The current approach to Workforce Planning – generally a static, manual, arduous endeavor – is no longer fit for purpose. It doesn’t give organizations the agility they need around talent, and the plan goes out of date too quickly.
58% of employees surveyed believe that the skills their job requires will change significantly in the next five years – WEF
A good workforce plan requires deep, relevant, contextual insights about the skills you have and need… which is where most companies fall short. They don’t have a clear picture of what they have today, far less the skills they might need in the future.
In our research, Navigating The Changing Talent Landscape, less than 60% of the business leaders we surveyed think their businesses understand what skills they may need in the future (56%) “to a great extent”.
Most businesses can predict customer demand and manage supply effectively, foresee risks to their business, and adapt accordingly. But when it comes to talent management, and questions around hiring, training and retention, they lack the same predictability. Given that around 70% of a company’s resources are dedicated to human capital, this gap surely needs addressing.
Talent management is often driven by subjectivity, making it difficult to make data-driven decisions. Yet, the biggest risk to a company's success is not having the right people with the right skills to achieve key objectives.
“One step at a time is fine for survival. But if you want to thrive and grow and outpace your competition, you have to ensure that longevity for your workforce and plan ahead to what you might need in the future.” – Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research
Businesses also frequently see talent as a fixed asset, overlooking the amazing potential of people to learn and grow – and the fact that skills can be redeployed in different parts of the business.
In other words, they need data that is more useful – insights about skills, rather than previous experience – and they need that data in real time.
A new approach to Workforce Planning 🌟
Only 20% of organizations actually engage in strategic workforce planning (Forrester Research).
You can now have dynamic, AI-driven, skills-based Workforce Planning, where leaders, HR teams and managers can get continuous and accurate insights around how best to close skills gaps (before they even emerge). They can easily see when to hire, and when to source internally, upskill workers, or create a short-term project.
This real-time intelligence can also be provided to managers in the flow of work, inside platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams, making it easier and faster for them to make the right talent decisions. The technology we have today means it doesn’t have to be complicated to make (and meet) workforce plans, and you don’t need to log into tons of systems to make good, fast decisions.
The approach works when you have unified skills data at the core, and use ethical AI to pull out insights from this data. You then have real-time Skills Intelligence: a connected and useful way of allocating people to roles, or learning opportunities, at scale.
“How do you start to understand what the next two years are going to look like? How do we start to get prepared and get our business prepared? … actually starting to think about what are the critical skills within your entire organization? Because if you then start to think about critical skills, you start to talk about critical roles. And I think that just starts to help you be much more planful and prepared for the direction of travel that your business is going through.” – Katherine Rooney, VP Talent Attraction & Acquisition, Mimecast
The power of Skills Intelligence 💡
Skills Intelligence is what powers agile, real-time Workforce Planning. So how do you get that? First you need a clear skills taxonomy, defining skills consistently across roles. Then you need to bring all your skills data together, from across various systems, and keep it up to date as people learn new things.
Thanks to advances in technology, talent data can now be gathered and understood quickly – and kept up to date automatically. Explainable AI and a knowledge graph can help connect data from multiple sources and maintain skills information.
This unified database – a standardized, enriched, and context-rich skills database – means integrating supply and demand insights (the skills you have and the skills you need). With the right HR tech vendor, you can combine talent data with a dynamic Job Architecture, for incredibly powerful insights about people and roles, fully contextualized to your organization and industry.
It should also include insights around market trends and competitors, to help you make better talent decisions in real time.
“Skills intelligence can inform every aspect of the candidate and employee journey, not just matching candidate skills to jobs, but also working farther upstream to help normalize and harmonize all the language that we use across our job architecture, into workforce planning and org design.” – Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research
AI is changing the game 🚀
AI allows you to get a much better handle on talent data – and can even infer the skills that people are likely to have (adjacent skills) but haven’t listed on their CV, or well set up to learn (potential skills).
And, by analyzing historical data and current trends, AI tools can forecast future talent needs, identify skill gaps, and recommend hiring strategies that align with organizational goals – anticipating project demands and aligning workforce capabilities accordingly.
AI’s predictive capabilities also enable HR teams to develop succession plans, ensuring leadership continuity and minimizing disruption in key roles.
The benefits of real-time Workforce Planning 🕰️
“We’re not just looking at just to fill a person in a seat: we’re looking at the evolution of the organization.” – Art Lokerson, HR Product Management Director – Talent Acquisition, Wells Fargo
When they understand employee skills and competencies at any given moment, organizations are able to quickly identify areas where they already have the necessary skills to seize new opportunities or address emerging challenges.
Moreover, if they bring all their talent data together and enrich it with AI, they can fish from a wider pool – and meet their goals faster, with the ideal skills fit.
A workforce plan can provide your organization with a continuous competitive advantage – but a new approach is sorely needed. Better Skills Intelligence can enable smarter, real-time Workforce Planning. Is your organization ready to embrace it?