Smarter Workforce Planning Starts With Connected Talent Data
Workforce planning is one of the most important – and most difficult – challenges facing HR and business leaders today. You’re expected to forecast future needs, identify critical gaps, and build agile talent strategies. But too often, you’re doing it with incomplete data, siloed systems, and static org charts.
What if you had a single, connected view of your workforce?
What if you could plan based on real skills data, not just job titles and headcount?
That’s what unified workforce data enables – and it’s reshaping how companies approach workforce planning.
The Problem: Planning Without Visibility 🌥️
Traditional workforce planning often relies on historical data, static HRIS fields, and assumptions from business leaders. The result?
- Headcount plans that don’t meet business needs in the long-run
- Overlooked internal talent with relevant or emerging skills (increasing risk of churn)
- Inefficient hiring for roles that could be filled through upskilling or mobility – stalling growth
- Missed opportunities to redeploy talent for faster transformation
62% of HR leaders agree that uncertainty around future skills poses a significant risk. Disconnected data makes it hard to answer even basic questions:
- What skills do we have today?
- Where are we exposed to risk or redundant roles?
- Who is ready to step into critical roles?
- How should we plan for growth, AI adoption, or regulatory change?
It’s little wonder that 66% of HR leaders said their workforce planning is limited to headcount planning, and they struggle to demonstrate ROI for strategic workforce planning efforts.
The Solution: Unified Workforce Data, Powered by Skills Intelligence 💡
With unified workforce data, you can connect the dots across your HR stack and gain a skills-based view of your organization. This isn’t just about pulling data into a dashboard – it’s about creating a dynamic, AI-powered data layer that gives you:
- A living skills inventory across your workforce
- Real-time insights into internal mobility, succession, and attrition risk
- The ability to model future scenarios with accurate talent inputs
- A powerful combination of internal and external labor market data
- Integrated data across platforms like Workday and SAP, and your LMS, CRM and more.
This unified view transforms workforce planning from reactive to strategic.
How To Get There: A 5-Step Path To Skills-Driven Planning 🧭
1. Make skills the common language across teams
From HRBPs to finance and L&D, align everyone around a shared view of workforce capabilities – so planning conversations are consistent, data-driven, and actionable. Define people and work in the same way: looking at the skills needed for certain tasks, and the skills underlying people’s capabilities.
2. Use A Skills Framework That Works for You
Adopt a tailored skills taxonomy that is tailored for your organization, rather than something “off the shelf” – it should be aligned with your organizational structure, operating model, and industry. Ensure it’s granular enough for hiring and development, but broad enough for strategic planning. The contextualized data enables a richer experience and more accurate recommendations.
3. Centralize Your Data Across Systems
Build a connected ecosystem with your HCM at the core. Integrate performance, learning, recruitment, and project data to fuel a single, unified skills graph.
4. Enrich With Labor Market & Industry Insights
Incorporate real-time data on emerging roles, in-demand skills, and competitive benchmarks. Trends around the cost and availability of certain skills should feed into hiring, reskilling and redeployment decisions today, as part of plans for the future.
5. Activate Your Data With AI
Use AI to quickly and precisely identify talent gaps, simulate scenarios (e.g., technological transformation, mergers, or regional expansion), and surface internal candidates for succession or reskilling pathways. Stay agile and informed: the workforce of tomorrow needs different skills to the workforce of today, but it includes a lot of the same people.
Ensure AI models and experiences are transparent and compliant: not all AI is created equal. Is the AI audited for bias? Can recommendations be explained clearly to the user? Are humans kept in the loop, reviewing suggestions to ultimately make decisions?
Real Results: Planning With Confidence, Not Guesswork 🔮
Organizations using unified workforce data are building more agile workforces by:
- Identifying future-critical roles and skill gaps before they impact delivery
- Accelerating redeployment and reskilling efforts
- Making workforce investments that are backed by data, not intuition.
Smarter workforce planning starts with better data — and better data starts with unifying the systems and signals you already have.
With connected skills intelligence, you can plan with confidence, build resilient teams, and stay ahead of change.