strategic workforce planning education

Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) Certification

Class Format

Forecast and plan the workforce your organization will need to succeed in the future.

Skill gaps or shortages. Turnover. An aging workforce. Changing business models. Managing talent risks and expenses. The complexity and urgency of these issues make it feel impossible to plan more than a few months out.

You need a way to develop and implement a workforce plan that is agile and dynamic enough to help your organization thrive in today’s environment—while at the same time establishing yourself as a strategic partner to the business.

HCI’s Strategic Workforce Planning certification takes workforce planning out of the theoretical realm and into reality by giving you a methodology and set of tools to implement right away.

What You'll Learn

Assess Your Organization’s Readiness

Find out where you stand so you can successfully implement and sustain workforce planning

Align Your Strategy

Segment roles according to your organization’s strategy

Scan the Environment

Look for internal and external factors that affect your ability to put the right talent in place

Construct Data-Based Scenarios

Imagine what the future holds so you can prepare for it

Develop an Action Plan

Compare where you are now with where you want to go and make a plan to close the gaps 

What to Expect

• Select virtual or in-person training dates and times that fit your schedule
• Finish your HCI program with a free  toolkit, access to additional videos and research, and a set of skills  that you can use on the job immediately 
• Access log-in information, certification materials (participant guide and toolkit), and the exam in  your MyHCI profile  
• Chat and  interact with faculty and peers in person or via Zoom
• Earn your HCI certification  by attending all the sessions, completing all classwork, and passing the multiple-choice exam with a score of 80% or higher 
• Renew your HCI certification  every three years by obtaining 60 credits 
• Attend this certification program and earn 13 HCI, 13 HRCI, 13 SHRM, and 13 ATD  recertification credits

Earn Your Human Capital Strategy Credential

Build the in-demand strategic capabilities you need to advance your HR career and lead the future of HR in only 18 months. You'll take three core programs and two strategic accelerators as well as complete mentoring and an advised portfolio project. Graduates of this program demonstrate a breadth of HR knowledge and capabilities to bring wherever they go.

Learn How to Earn a Human Capital Strategy Credential

Course Outline

• Discover the context of strategic workforce planning 
• Distinguish between operational and strategic workforce planning
• Evaluate your organization’s strategic workforce planning readiness
• Align workforce planning to your organization’s strategy
• Segment roles to identify the most strategic roles for your workforce planning efforts
• Scan the environment for internal and external factors that impact your organization’s ability to carry out its strategy
• Conduct a current state analysis of your most strategic roles
• Construct scenarios that help your organization prepare for the future
• Construct scenarios that help your organization prepare for the future (continued from Day 1)
• Identify gaps between current and future states
• Create an action plan to fill gaps; track progress of the plan
• Implement and sustain strategic workforce planning by applying the practices of high-performing organizations in six key areas
• Plan how to bring strategic workforce planning to your organization or improve your existing process

Strategic Certification Courses for HR Professionals

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Workforce Planning: The Future of Work

Program overview, program objectives.

• Analyze the organizational environment including future business challenges and their likely impact on the organization's workforce.
• Integrate workforce planning into the strategic plan of the organization.
• Describe the key steps to developing a strategic workforce plan including analysis, forecasting, strategy development and cost modeling.
• Create or refine a framework for your organizations workforce planning strategy.

Program Outline

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Strategic Workforce Planning

Organizations are seeking to leverage human capital to differentiate and gain a competitive advantage in today’s rapidly changing business environment. One significant advantage often comes through talent strategies linked to business strategies. Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) connects talent strategy to actionable, integrated talent management and business plans. SWP practitioners play the role of diagnostician, analyst, educator and solution orchestrator to focus human resources (HR) and organizational resources for maximum impact within their organizations. 

In this course, students will learn SWP processes and techniques grounded in a data-driven approach. There will be a heavy focus on the practical application of SWP in today’s business context. Students intending to pursue careers in any HR domain will benefit from this course.   

Registering at least three weeks prior to the course start date is highly recommended.

More details

You'll Walk Away with

• The ability to recall the history, role, and evolution of strategic workforce planning
• The ability to enumerate the human capital implications of an organization’s business strategy
• An introduction to the concepts of talent supply and demand tied to business strategy
• The ability to assess and apply talent access strategies to meet talent demands
• The ability to evaluate and assess case studies of strategic workforce planning
• The ability to construct a strategic workforce plan based upon analytical rigor and quantified talent gaps and communicate the outcomes of the analysis
• The ability to articulate the benefits and know-how to maintain a strategic workforce planning capability within your organization

Course Details

Additional information.

Have you considered our Certificate Programs? Certificate in People Analytics

Course Number

HRMD1-CE9601

Continuing Education Units (CEU)

What Is Workforce Planning?

Workforce planning is critical for the health and growth of any organization. As an HR professional, you know how much of an undertaking it is to hire the right people with the right skill set at the right time. Then add on the responsibilities of budgeting for new hires and internal promotions, keeping current employees engaged and retention rates high, all while growing a business — it's overwhelming. 

To help you keep calm and workforce plan on, we created a brief guide that covers the basics of workforce planning. Feel free to click on the links below to jump ahead.

Use our template to seamlessly calculate your own employee retention rate.

Table of Contents

What is Workforce Planning?

Benefits of strategic workforce planning, stages of strategic workforce planning.

Workforce planning is the process of auditing, predicting and managing the employment needs of your company in relation to its greater strategic business goals.

Think about it this way, your product team is constantly evaluating the product —  what customers like and want more of — while at the same time predicting what’s going to be the next big thing. Similarly, your company needs to continuously evaluate its people — what they like and don’t like in their roles — as well as how the company is projected to grow and who will need to be hired, promoted or reorganized to meet those needs.

When it comes down to it, the goal of workforce planning is to help your workforce meet  the following criteria as closely as possible:

Workforce planning is a massive undertaking, especially the first time you do it. It can be difficult to know where and how to start as well as what resources are required to build a strategic workforce plan. Before we delve into the details, check out a few benefits of creating a workforce plan that make the effort worthwhile.

Help teams justify additional hires

Save time and money by anticipating growth and change 

Prepare for organizational changes proactively

Support finance team in budgeting for future workforce needs

Collaborate with the strategic business planning process

Recognize gaps in the workforce that need filling

Identify critical roles and teams to expand for growth

Balance business goals alongside hiring

Prioritize employee retention and engagement to reduce hiring needs

Analyze Strategic Direction

In order to plan for future workforce needs, you first need to analyze the current state of your workforce. Start by answering these questions:

What departments are running lean and could use additional support?

What is the manager-to-direct report ratio?

What individual contributors are ready for a promotion?

Do current employees need additional training to advance their careers at the company?

Is there a skills gap among current employees that needs to be filled by an external hire?

How long do employees typically stay at your company?

Why do employees leave your company?

To answer the majority of these questions, you need to take a deep dive into your overall employee lifecycle , which  will also help you better understand why people apply for roles at your company and why they leave.

Additionally, look carefully at your recruitment metrics so you can better optimize your strategy. 

Forecast Workforce Supply & Demand

Now that you've analyzed the current state of your workforce, look more closely at the employees you currently have, otherwise referred to as your workforce supply, and predict how their roles will change over time. These factors play a significant role in how, who and when you should hire candidates. Key areas to consider are: 

Employee retention: Determine roles that can be filled by internal candidates through promotion or professional development 

Turnover: Anticipate turnover by knowing individual employee goals and career paths.

Departmental attrition: Are certain departments or roles becoming obsolete or less valuable to the company, and if so, will you need to downsize or reorganize.

Physical office space: Is there enough physical office space and equipment to sufficiently support more employees?

Recruiting resources: Identify which roles need to be filled by external candidates what resources your team will need to recruit them — professional recruiters, money for job boards and advertisements, etc.

Communications resources: Recruiting and building an employer brand consumes a significant amount of time and resources. Check to see if anyone on your marketing team has the bandwidth to help out.

Once you’ve estimated your current workforce supply, you’ll want to consider the demand of each area. Understanding the difference between supply and demand in your workforce will help you identify gaps between what resources are readily available and what resources your organization needs to grow on track. In terms of workforce demand, you’ll want to look at:

Employment market: Take a look at the recruitment market to see which roles are in high demand and will be difficult to hire. 

Upcoming funding: What roles are critical right now and which ones can wait until you raise more capital?

Skills training: Will you need to train new or current employees skills to ensure they will keep up with change, or will you need to hire already skilled candidates for the roles.

Keep in mind the supply and demand of workforce planning will change over time so it's important to include your team in the workforce supply planning process because the decisions made will ultimately affect their jobs and careers.

Create a Workforce Planning Budget

At this stage, you should have a fairly detailed blueprint of who you have employed today, who you will need in the future and any gaps between the two. Now, you need to start prioritizing your roles by the most difficult to fill, highest priority and cost-per-hire.

How you prioritize roles will also depend on your external hiring and internal retention budgets. To hire talented candidates — and pay them what they’re worth — you need to determine a budget through workforce planning.

Figure out how long it takes to hire someone and how much it will cost by comparing your external hiring budget to your current recruitment metrics. By looking at the metrics, you should also be able to pinpoint areas of the recruitment strategy that need improvement.

Set a Hiring Timeframe 

From here, build out a timeline that prioritizes certain roles and takes into account how long it will take to hire each role. This timeline can span between one year to 10 years depending on your strategy. Regardless of how far out your strategy spans, include intermittent short term goals throughout the plan to ensure you're always pacing on track.

Also, keep in mind this plan is not set in stone, it will fluctuate over time and require adjustments along the way.

Reevaluate Workforce Plan

Once you’ve created a workforce plan, you’re not done. In fact, you will constantly be monitoring the workforce needs of your company as business goals change and your internal workforce evolves. It's important to frequently get feedback and buy-in from employees, especially as the company grows.

If you create a culture that is open to having tough conversations with employees about their roles, performance and future career, you will be significantly better equipped to anticipate and adjust your workforce plan as changes occur. Employees will also be more keen to stay at your company and refer cohorts to open roles, thus further simplifying your recruiting and retention process. Even as the plan you create changes over time, it will always be a guideline for your teams to assess the effectiveness of their strategies and keep them on track over the course of several years.

You will have access to 50+ pages of data, tips, and advice.

Great Companies Need Great People. That's Where We Come In.

Workforce Planning

Ivan Andreev

Demand Generation & Capture Strategist, Valamis

January 17, 2022 · updated April 5, 2024

11 minute read

Taking the time to plan and make decisions as part of a broader strategy improves every aspect of your business, including your workforce. Despite the size or type of company, workforce planning is a valuable HR process that ensures you have the staff to execute your business strategy.

Learn what workforce planning is, how it helps with goals and produces positive outcomes, the benefits it can offer, five key steps in workforce planning, and what it looks like in practice.

What is workforce planning?

Primary workforce planning criteria, the goal of workforce planning, how workforce planning affects hr processes, the benefits of workforce planning.

• The five core workforce planning steps

Workforce planning is the process of analyzing existing employees and planning for future staffing requirements through talent gap assessment, developing employee management procedures, and setting recruitment strategies.

With effective workforce planning, your business is always staffed with the necessary talent, knowledge, and experience to produce positive business results.

Workforce planning requires developing an appropriate and cost-effective strategy for retaining, recruiting, and training your workforce while also continually assessing employee performance.

A survey by the American Productivity & Quality Center (APQC) shows 89% of 236 organizations integrated workforce planning into their business operations.

The plan for your workforce, what it will look like moving forward, and how to strategize for specific goals are unique to your business and depend on many factors. Typical components that affect workforce planning include:

• Talent availability
• Business growth
• Age of the existing workforce
• Current knowledge/skill gaps
• And much more

Strategic workforce planning

Strategic workforce planning is a proactive approach to managing staffing needs and aligns HR processes to business-wide goals. It guides future employee plans and decisions, ensuring they adhere to the company’s long-term vision.

Strategic workforce planning tends to take place at the senior leadership level and focuses on big picture goals such as:

• Structural organization
• Employee redeployment
• Succession planning
• Staffing budgets
• Maintaining capacity
• Reducing risk

Operational workforce planning

In contrast to strategic workforce planning, operational workforce planning focuses on the business’s immediate priorities. For example, which staff level can efficiently meet the current deadlines and objectives?

How to conduct a skills gap analysis and what to do next

Start building your foundation for strategic workforce development.

Criteria to consider when planning for your company’s future workforce include:

• Employee numbers : getting the correct workforce size so the business is not overstaffed and inefficient but not too small to hinder growth and fail to match demand.
• Skillset : having the right mix of skills, capabilities, knowledge, and experience to perform effectively and achieve your goals.
• Budget : finding the optimal staffing expenditure to achieve a high return on investment from employees and maximize profits.
• Flexibility : developing your workforce to be agile and adapt quickly when changes in the market occur.

The primary goal of workforce planning is to create a strategy for your staffing needs that ensures you can meet strategic objectives both now and in the future.

To achieve this goal, workforce planning requires an in-depth understanding of your existing workforce, employee skills, experience, load capability, and potential talent gaps.

Through performance tracking and employee assessment, you can take a birds-eye view of your entire workforce and create actionable plans for the future.

Workforce planning allows companies to understand and design their workforce effectively and efficiently with long-term objectives in mind. It prevents problems from developing and allows management to spot issues early, creating plans to remedy them. Examples could include:

• Identifying understaffed departments and potential bottlenecks
• Staffing requirement to scale operations
• Excess employees for redeployment or termination

Recruitment and employee development

Workforce planning provides the game plan for your company’s recruitment and employee development .

With a clear understanding of your existing workforce and your future goals, you can profile the skills, experience, and knowledge required to meet your needs and develop hiring and training processes to match.

Companies are constantly competing for the same high-end talent. With appropriate workforce planning in place, you can better identify future top employees for your business and develop talent acquisition strategies to attract them to your company.

Plus, workforce planning analysis can help companies formulate proper training and employee development to fill talent gaps while also finding individuals capable of excelling with the correct professional development in place.

This leads us to succession planning and ensuring you maintain successful leadership across your company.

By recognizing the leadership positions currently open or soon to be available, companies can begin assessing existing employees for promotion or targeting outside hires with the right mix of skill and experience.

Workforce planning together with succession planning creates a smooth transition for the critical roles in your company so you can provide an uninterrupted, seamless service or product for your customers.

Performance management

A significant outcome of workforce planning is managing the performance of your employees to increase productivity and efficiency.

With workforce planning, you can understand and develop strategies that get the most out of your employees to increase output and get a higher return on investment from your staffing expenditure.

1. Preparing for the future

With workforce planning, you have a roadmap for your staffing requirements to prepare for the future.

This could mean increasing the number of employees to match growth forecasts or pivoting to a different business model and finding the staff you need to accomplish this.

2. Discovering workforce gaps

Understanding the gaps of your current workforce informs your future personnel strategy in terms of recruitment, redeployment, and training.

Read: Skills gap and skills gap analysis

3. Effective succession planning

By identifying and developing employees with the potential for future leadership roles, you can effectively plan for staff leaving with minimal disruption.

Succession planning can also have a positive effect on employee engagement:

• 62% of employees would be “significantly more engaged” if they had a succession plan at their company.
• 94% of employers said having succession plans in place positively impacted employee engagement .

Succession planning template

It can help you navigate crises and leadership transitions with ease.

4. Improved retention strategies

Effective workforce planning gives you a clear understanding of employee skills and where they can be the most successful in the business.

So rather than terminating employees, you can retain valuable staff through well-planned redeployment.

5. Flexibility

A clear workforce plan with recruitment and training structures in place can make your business more agile, with the ability to efficiently anticipate and react to change.

You can reduce your overall staffing costs by developing plans to:

• Increase your productivity and workforce ROI
• Retain talent and reduce costs associated with employee turnover
• Develop a flexible workforce that can meet customer demand in different circumstances

Labor costs can account for up 70% of total business costs . Workforce planning allows you to map talent to value and ensure you are getting the best results for the costs .

The 5 core workforce planning steps

Successfully implementing new workforce planning strategies is an extensive procedure. However, businesses can break down workforce planning into five core steps to simplify the process.

1. Deciding strategic direction and goals

Workforce planning is a top-down process requiring clear organizational direction and defined strategic goals to inform and guide future decisions.

• What direction do you see your business going in?
• What are you hoping to achieve through workforce planning?
• What are the primary goals/milestones you are targeting?
• Why does your business need new workforce planning structures?

These are vital questions to ask yourself before analyzing your workforce and implementing new employee management strategies.

It is also important to remember that every process in your business affects another. Therefore, your workforce planning must be an organization-wide endeavor and include effective communication between HR and other departments.

Your new workforce plan must be produced with a collaborative approach that generates a consensus amongst all invested parties. Without organizational buy-in and a rationale for new strategies, you cannot reap the benefits of workforce planning.

Consider this step setting the “soft” workforce planning framework that will define the overall strategy to assess future information rather than the plan’s specific details.

2. Analyze existing workforce

The next step is to properly assess your existing workforce.

Common strategies used in this step include:

• Demand planning – Determining the number of employees needed for each role required to reach your goal. Demand planning requires accurate business forecasts to determine your workforce’s future number, structure, and composition.
• Internal supply – Internal supply planning needs accurate talent evaluations, an understanding of the expected employee turnover rate (retirements, resignations, etc.), and the design of training and professional development programs.
• Gap analysis – Identifying the gaps in your workforce and making plans to close them through recruitment, redeployment, and training.

These strategies help to answer the following questions:

• Do you have the right-sized workforce?
• What skills, knowledge, and experience do your current employees have?
• Do your employees need additional training?
• What new resources can improve workforce performance?
• Is your workforce correctly structured? (This includes organizational design, departments, communication channels, etc.)
• What is your current employee turnover rate?

What you have now is the starting point for future workforce plans. You can begin developing workforce planning strategies when you know what you have (step 2) and where you want to be (step 1).

A common pitfall of workforce planning is ensuring it is based on high-quality information from within the organization and external sources. Workforce planning defined by inaccurate forecasts and undeliverable future goals cannot be successful.

3. Develop your plan

This is where companies must take their overall goal, input the assessment of their existing workforce and produce a concrete plan for the future.

Businesses must plan their workforce to reflect the value and revenue it produces. A simple example of workforce planning in action could be:

A company is manufacturing two models of cars. Model A is the business’ flagship car, selling the most and bringing in the most revenue. However, model B is showing significant growth, and the income from model A is beginning to stagnate.

The car company can produce a simple revenue table based on 2023 figures and 2024’s forecasts.

The revenue per employee for model A is $250,000, and the revenue per employee for model B is $300,000.

Based on growth forecasts, you can estimate that staff working on model B will need to increase by 57 to match increased demand. This process assumes the forecasts are accurate and there are no sudden changes in sales or production. At the same time, model A will likely begin to have a surplus of staff in 2024 and need a reduction of 8 employees.

With workforce planning structures in place, you can develop plans to retrain and redeploy staff from Model A to Model B during 2023. This kind of planning minimizes disruption and reduces employee turnover.

Of course, this is just a plan based on forecasts and does not mean you should immediately move eight employees from model A to model B and hire 49 more. Instead, the business should put redeployment, hiring, and training plans in place to execute when key revenue indicators are met and take a gradual approach that matches the shift in focus of their business.

4. Implement workforce planning

Successfully implementing workforce planning requires:

• HR personnel to clearly understand their new roles and responsibilities.
• Strategies and processes for recording all relevant data and information.
• Effective communication channels between all invested parties to support the plan.
• Defined measurement and evaluation criteria to assess the plan’s success.

While the future HR plans for managing your workforce are specific to your business, they will involve some or all of the following:

• Recruitment
• Redeployment
• Outsourcing
• Deploying new technology

With many new processes to implement, workforce planning does not transform your company overnight. Instead, it is a gradual endeavor that optimizes each procedure for the given circumstances to get your business closer to your long-term goals.

5. Monitor results

It is crucial to remember workforce planning is an iterative process whereby progress is monitored and measured against specific milestones and long-term goals.

Post-implementation, your workforce planning processes may need adjusting due to unexpected factors within your business or to meet new realities of your industry.

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Creating a path for continuous strategic workforce planning

How companies can integrate talent with finance and risk to better balance staffing needs.

Organizations face two major challenges when they implement ongoing and continuous workforce planning. The first is finding the technology and tools that are right for the organization today while also leaving room for it to grow. The second is identifying which skills will be needed for the future and which are becoming obsolete as automation and artificial intelligence (AI) reinvent jobs and the nature of work itself. To successfully enable continuous workforce planning, we recommend the following steps:

• Match technology to maturity: New or growing strategic workforce planning (SWP) functions require tools that enable basic workforce planning now while allowing more complex planning to be conducted in the future.
• Anticipate organizational changes: Generative AI is leading to the creation of a new support ecosystem requiring different skillsets, such as automation managers, and the development of new types of tech functions, such as AI prompt engineers.
• Leadership alignment and education: Leaders need to focus on being more interconnected with their organization and other leaders, as SWP is a living process that is impacted by many variables, requiring organizational-wide buy in and collaboration.

In this paper, we discuss the benefits of integrating SWP into the wider enterprise performance-planning process. We also describe effective ways to hire, develop, outsource, and automate your staffing needs so that you can accomplish the strategic, operational, and financial goals that will support your business growth.

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A How-To Guide for Effective Workforce Planning in the Higher Education Sector

The post-pandemic workforce landscape is uncertain, with SUMS seeing changing attitudes towards working expectations, continued instability and new perceptions of culture and connection both inside and outside the sector.  Leaders have an opportunity to try to understand, plan for, and manage these uncertainties - and in doing so can move from being reactive to proactive.  In our latest briefing paper ,  SUMS Consultant Emma Ogden shares insight on effective workforce planning in Higher Education.

Effective strategic workforce planning in HE is a critical success factor for an organisation. It involves designing, developing, and delivering your future workforce by aligning people, work and competencies with your strategy and objectives, to drive delivery and performance.  It will analyse, visualise, and identify what you need in terms of the size, type, experience, knowledge, and skills of your workforce.  It is a tool that can help you adapt quickly to change, leading to higher, more reliable delivery and a leaner, optimised workforce. Given staffing and related costs often count for over 50% of overall university spending, why would you not spend time planning the size, shape, and skills of the workforce? However, the HE sector has a relatively immature approach to workforce planning and there is work to do. Below, I highlight some of the key points within our latest SUMS Briefing Paper: The Importance of Strategic Workforce Planning .

What is Workforce Planning?

Put simply, a workforce plan will ensure that an organisation has the right people , with the right skills , at the right place and time , within a budget that you can afford.

The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development (CIPD) defines workforce planning as:

“[the] process of balancing labour supply (skills) against the demand (numbers needed). It includes analysing the current workforce, determining future workforce needs, identifying the gap between the present and the future, and implementing solutions so that an organisation can accomplish its mission, goals, and strategic plan”.

The Importance of Strategic Workforce Planning in the Higher Education Sector

Workforce planning is critical within universities.  Institutions need to create systems that meet the changing student and staff expectations, and effective strategic workforce planning is a mechanism that can help achieve this.  Student and staff experiences and demands are changing, and the workforce needs to adapt to meet needs. Workforce planning within institutions can take several forms and vary in strategic intent and maturity.  With the most mature application of workforce planning, institutions may be able to:

• Create stronger agility and responsiveness to business needs
• Design the workforce required to operationalise and deliver future strategic approaches: capability (talent demand) and capacity (supply)
• Understand and bridge the gap which exists between the current and prospective state of play (skills, behaviours, and resources)
• Create a road map of objectives through an owned action plan
• Make informed and strategically aligned talent and resourcing decisions that enable teams to meet the relevant capability and capacity needs
• Develop a workforce ‘establishment’, which enables informed decisions on resource allocation. This can lead to a reduced need for initiatives such as change or reorganisation when workforce changes can be planned over longer time periods.
• Reduce cost and resource on reactive recruitment campaigns by improving knowledge and understanding of resource and capability needs
• Engage with data more meaningfully and as a driver of insight and assessor of impact
• Improve employee experience by looking at current talent and investing in their development needs.

Developing a Strategic Workforce Plan

The process begins with an exploration of institutional strategy and objectives – for the organisation and then areas that need a specific focus. What opportunities and trends exist which can be exploited, or what challenges are ahead?  It is important that this is future-looking to enable the institution to consider where they want to be and to acknowledge any known landscape changes. While nobody could have predicted Covid-19, the resulting impact and anticipated changes to the marketplace are now being recognised and regulated [1] – for example, changes to the expectations of flexible working and skills shortages in certain specialisms.

Effective workforce planning in Higher Education should include:

• An action plan
• Identified areas for investment
• Robust data
• Regular evaluation

Recommendations, Considerations and Resources for Effective Workforce Planning in Higher Education

The process of transitioning from an operational – and largely reactive – workforce planning culture to a strategic, informed, and predictive one may take several iterations.  For our full list of recommendations, you can read the SUMS Briefing Paper .  Here are some initial tools to help you on your journey.

SUMS has developed a Strategic Workforce Planning Toolkit that provides oversight and guidance to help universities complete a successful strategic workforce plan.  It outlines the key principles behind effective workforce planning and includes templates to help you identify your data requirements, explore learning and development needs, and develop your own action plan.  SUMS Members can contact SUMS Consultant Emma Ogden at [email protected] for a copy of the toolkit.

HR Maturity Assessment

SUMS can provide an assessment of your strategic workforce planning maturity level as part of an HR Maturity Model Assessment.

Best practice examples

For further insight and examples, we recommend the following best practice approaches in developing, implementing and evaluating the success of strategic workforce planning initiatives:

• Developing a ‘bottom-up’ workforce plan – Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
• Improving workforce planning and intelligence – Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
• Student paramedic programme – West Midlands Ambulance Service NHS Foundation Trust

For further information on any of the above please contact Emma Ogden at [email protected] .

[1] Employment Law in Higher Education for 2022 (sums.org.uk)

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Introduction to workforce planning

What is workforce planning in HR and how are workforce plans related to business and HR strategies? Boost your ability to respond to frequent changes by learning to use organisation design tools and techniques.

Access to the CIPD Learning Hub

15% discount for CIPD members

Develop specialist knowledge

£600.00 exc. VAT

Perfect for:

You’ll learn how to:.

• explain what workforce planning is and how it benefits business
• create a ‘baseline’ of what your organisation looks like and what it is trying to achieve
• determine workforce supply and demand to conduct a gap analysis
• create and implement an action plan

About this course

Course length: One day

Delivery: Face-to-face, and self-directed learning

Suitable for: People professionals who need to know how to deliver a workforce that will achieve organisational goals

Topics covered

• introducing workforce planning: what is workforce planning in HR?
• understanding the baseline
• supply, demand and gap analysis
• creating and delivering an action plan

What to expect from this ‘workforce planning’ course

This short course is for people professionals who want to know how to deliver a workforce that responds to their organisation’s goals. You’ll learn the latest practices and data-driven insights to determine and identify future demand and supply for people and skills.

Delivered by experts in workforce planning, this course will equip you with an introductory knowledge of workforce planning that you can apply to your workplace. You’ll learn how to conduct a gap analysis between employee supply and demand. You’ll also create and implement an action plan to close this gap. This will include identifying potential challenges, improving productivity, targeting inefficiencies, and increasing employee retention

What you’ll need to do on this course

This is a one-day course, delivered in-person

We recommend you support your learning with self-directed learning – this should take around one hour before and four hours after the course

To ensure you get the most out of this course, we will ask you to complete a short questionnaire before the session. This will allow our experts to fully support you with your learning goals. ​

What you’ll get on this ‘workforce planning’ course

At the end of this course, you’ll receive a certificate of attendance.

Taking part in this course gives you access to the CIPD Learning Hub for 12 months. Here, you can access your course content together with other valuable resources and tools. When you finish your course, you can enjoy an additional 12 months of access to other resources on the Learning Hub.

Learning outcomes

By the end of this ‘workforce planning’ course, you’ll be able to:.

• answer the question, ‘what is workforce planning in HR?’
• create, implement and deliver a strategic action plan
• establish a baseline that shows what your organisation looks like, what it is trying to achieve and why
• determine workforce supply, historical workforce trends and the future forecast
• assess demand, demand drivers and the future forecast
• create a gap analysis between supply and demand
• create and implement an action plan to close the gap between supply and demand.

Team bookings

Interested in booking this course for your team? We offer group bookings solutions for teams of four or more people.

When your teams learn with the CIPD, they get direct access to the latest professional research and insights.

And through courses co-created with industry thought leaders and practitioners, they’ll build the skills and confidence they need to inspire action, influence change and drive business value.

We offer a wide range of Learning and Development solutions to suit employees at every level – whether in HR, L&D, OD or wider people management.

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Did you know? You can receive a 15% discount on all CIPD learning courses by becoming a member or a core learning subscriber.

Strategic Workforce Planning Masterclass

The Strategic Workforce Planning Masterclass equips you with the skills to proactively align your workforce with the organisation's current and long-term business plan.

At a glance

• Articulate the value that strategic workforce planning can bring to your organisation
• Learn how to map your business strategy to your people strategy
• Strengthen your people and process skills
• Gain a practical five-step planning process to use within your organisation
• The Henley People & Organisational Change Pathway: complete any three of our People & Organisational Change programmes for a powerful holistic developmental journey.

Start dates

15 May 2024

Delivery: In-person Location: Greenlands campus

11 Oct 2024

Delivery: Live-online Location: Greenlands campus

Looking for a date?

No problem. Get in touch with our team to be kept in the loop on future course dates.

All programmes are subject to limited availability. We recommend booking a minimum of 30 days before the programme start date, to guarantee sufficient time for your enrolment and on-boarding.

Strategic workforce planning (SWP) involves proactively identifying your organisation's long-term business needs and developing an effective workforce plan to meet them. Yet despite its business-critical nature, many organisations do not understand the value of SWP or how to deliver it.

This live-online masterclass gives you the skills needed to lead in this area of organisational development. You will learn how to align your people resources with the organisation's business plan by getting the right people in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills. You will also leave with a five-step process to help you deliver SWP in your organisation.

The course content and case study reflect the current organisational design challenges resulting from the COVID-19 crisis. These include the sustainability of hard choices such as layoffs; matching the current workforce to the available work; and making rapid choices including redeployment or the delivery of new products and services.

Watch our programme information session.

Key benefits

Demystify SWP and understand the value it can deliver

Leave with a practical five-step process that you can apply within your organisation

Move from an operational to a strategic focus

Have better discussions with your business customers and support partners

Develop your HR executives into strategic leaders who can support the business using evidence-based plans

Take a more proactive approach to SWP - reactive approaches can be slow and costly

£995 (live-online) + VAT; £1,175 (in-person, including residential costs) + VAT

Standard rate VAT is applicable for UK businesses; overseas businesses based in the EU without a VAT number; and individuals based in the UK, EU, or rest of the world.

Course structure Open

Henley's People & Organisational Change masterclasses are delivered through the presentation and exploration of key ideas, peer discussion, group learning and case studies. Each masterclass:

• Focuses on organisational context, encouraging you to consider and discuss your own challenges
• Integrates soft skills and practice with theory, helping you develop the confidence and credibility you need to get results back in the workplace
• Gives you immediate practical takeaways such as an action plan aligned with your personal learning objectives
• Provides the opportunity to engage with a supportive peer network

The Strategic Workforce Planning masterclass is available live-online, delivered as two half-day facilitated interactive sessions, enabling real-time engagement and discussion.

Programme content

You will look at topics including:

• What is strategic workforce planning and why is it important?
• Mapping your business strategy - what does it mean in practice for your people and talent?
• Analysing your current and future workforce
• How to integrate the SWP five-step planning process into your organisation
• How SWP translates to operational realities like hiring, promotions, retention, rewards and people development

Teaching staff Open

Programme Director Paul Lambert is a senior HR practitioner with over 25 years of international experience in strategic workforce planning, organisational design, and change management.

Paul Lambert

Offers and discounts Open

Individual bookings The following reductions are available on programmes fees

• 10% for Henley alumni*
• 10% for members of The Henley Partnership

Multiple bookings The following discount is available on programme fees when multiple open programmes are booked. Payment is required in advance and this offer is subject to eligibility**.

• 10% 2-4 people
• 15% 5-9 people
• 20% 10+ people

Charities A 50% discount is available to registered charities.

It is subject to eligibility and available at Henley Business School's discretion**

Please note: * Alumni discount is available to Henley Business School alumni (as part of University of Reading) not to graduates of Henley Management College .

** Please contact us for eligibility criteria, availability and terms.

For more information Please contact [email protected]

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For 75 years, Henley Business School has developed confident and resilient business leaders. Executive Education at Henley is:

• Practical: we combine academic rigour with a strong practical focus, so you can immediately apply what you have learned back in your organisation.
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Strategic workforce planning in health and social care - an international perspective: A scoping review

Affiliations.

• 1 Workforce Observatory, University of Bradford, UK; Faculty of Health Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK. Electronic address: [email protected].
• 2 Workforce Observatory, University of Bradford, UK; Faculty of Health Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK.
• 3 Workforce Observatory, University of Bradford, UK; Faculty of Health Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK; Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research, Bradford, UK.
• 4 Workforce Observatory, University of Bradford, UK; Wolfson Centre for Applied Health Research, Bradford, UK; Faculty of Engineering and Informatics, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK.
• 5 Workforce Observatory, University of Bradford, UK; Faculty of Engineering and Informatics, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK.
• 6 Leeds Health and Care Academy, Leeds, UK.
• 7 Faculty of Health Studies, University of Bradford, Bradford, UK.
• PMID: 37099856
• DOI: 10.1016/j.healthpol.2023.104827

Effective strategic workforce planning for integrated and co-ordinated health and social care is essential if future services are to be resourced such that skill mix, clinical practice and productivity meet population health and social care needs in timely, safe and accessible ways globally. This review presents international literature to illustrate how strategic workforce planning in health and social care has been undertaken around the world with examples of planning frameworks, models and modelling approaches. The databases Business Source Premier, CINAHL, Embase, Health Management Information Consortium, Medline and Scopus were searched for full texts, from 2005 to 2022, detailing empirical research, models or methodologies to explain how strategic workforce planning (with at least a one-year horizon) in health and/or social care has been undertaken, yielding ultimately 101 included references. The supply/demand of a differentiated medical workforce was discussed in 25 references. Nursing and midwifery were characterised as undifferentiated labour, requiring urgent growth to meet demand. Unregistered workers were poorly represented as was the social care workforce. One reference considered planning for health and social care workers. Workforce modelling was illustrated in 66 references with predilection for quantifiable projections. Increasingly needs-based approaches were called for to better consider demography and epidemiological impacts. This review's findings advocate for whole-system needs-based approaches that consider the ecology of a co-produced health and social care workforce.

Keywords: Health and social care; Strategic workforce planning.

Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Publication types

• Forecasting
• Health Personnel*
• Health Services Needs and Demand*

United States: Strategic Workforce Planning As Competitive Advantage

Introduction

Labor shortages are at historical highs. There are 8.8 million job openings across the United States but only 6.4 million unemployed individuals Mismatched skills and a declining labor force participation of 62.7 percent heighten the issue. 1

If the labor gap weren't enough, rapidly rising wage costs, changed workforce expectations, artificial intelligence's progression, a workforce generational change, and a global swing to nationalism have created a significant talent demand and supply imbalance. Identifying, developing and keeping a resilient workforce has become a more difficult challenge than ever.

An Old Idea With a Data-Driven Focus – Strategic Workforce Planning

In the last decade, it has become clear that the workforce will never be the same. Assumptions around available workforce supply and demand, traditional budget cycle and tactical manpower planning are not only ineffective, but they leave organizations unprepared to address evolving risk and quickly capitalize on opportunity.

Strategic workforce planning aligns the composition of the workforce with the organization's strategic objectives and can help companies avoid costs associated with turnover, overstaffing and productivity loss. Strategic workforce planning is a careful balance between assessing business demands, both current and future, and understanding the external labor market dynamics along with the internal talent supply.

The plot twist this time for strategic workforce planning is the speed at which strategy moves and pivots are made, and the ability to tap into the dynamic and volatile labor landscape.

Understanding an Organization's Labor Gap

Organizations must consider all the nuances of their workforce needs (e.g., locations, skills, levels, risk tolerance, growth trajectory) to ensure planning for the right people in the right roles at the right time in order to meet strategic objectives. Evaluating demand from a top-down enterprise perspective and bottom-up functional perspective helps balance long-term planning vs. shortterm operational workforce needs. It is also critical to establish planning horizons to distinguish between strategic workforce plan, short-term workforce management and operational staffing needs. This drives alignment with the financial planning cycles where the workforce plan is an essential input. The key to establishing this alignment is using common business drivers to consider fluctuations around seasonality, business cycles, historical demand analysis and other scenarios. A lack of a well-defined demand framework creates a spiral of confusion across the organization and leads to cumulative over-hiring, followed by rapid layoffs once the demand cools.

Once assessment and definition of the optimal workforce needed is completed, the next step is to look both externally and internally to evaluate the available talent supply. By assessing the external talent pools against demand, including identifying potential job boards, benchmarking against current regional labor availability, and developing an employee value proposition to attract people with desired skills, the organization can begin to see potential costs and availability parameters. Internal talent supply analysis reveals skill availability, experiences and locations where people are available to fulfill demand. A thorough understanding of the talent supply allows organizations to effectively plan, adapt and thrive in the ever-changing business environment.

JOB AND SKILL ARCHITECTURE

The job and skill architecture establishes a common language to analyze the demand and supply gap across the organization. This involves developing not only job groups and job roles but also evaluating the capabilities aligned to the future strategy. It is important to pause and check if the capabilities needed for the future are a part of current skill architecture. Once there is a cohesive understanding of demand, it is easier to connect the demand to the internal and external supply. This alignment ensures that the organization accurately gauges its talent needs.

CLOSING THE WORKFORCE GAP

Once an organization has a clear grasp of its current or future labor gap, there are a handful of strategies to explore in bridging that gap that depend on time, cost and risk considerations.

• Buy – Hire new talent to fill the gap
• Build – Invest in learning and experiences to develop existing employees' skills to meet the organization's needs
• Borrow – Utilize contractors or contingent workers to fill the gap and to satisfy short-term objectives
• Bind – Improve the employee experience and decrease anticipated attrition rates
• Balance – Reduce underperforming talent to optimize workforce efficiency

These strategies provide organizations with a comprehensive toolkit to manage labor gaps and ensure workforce planning aligns with business objectives.

Throughout workforce planning, it's important for teams from Business Operations, Finance and HR to work closely together with common frameworks and assumptions. This helps the organization to stay focused on business goals, thoughtfully manage finances and maximize the workforce potential. This partnership across the enterprise builds the organizational muscle required for integrating workforce planning into continuous strategic business planning and proactively considering upcoming business disruptions.

1. U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, The Employment Situation — March 2024, News Release dated April 5, 2024, No. USDL-24-0629, Washington, DC.

Originally published by 01 May, 2024

The content of this article is intended to provide a general guide to the subject matter. Specialist advice should be sought about your specific circumstances.

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