Strategic Workforce Planning: anticipating your future workforce needs

Strategic Workforce Planning is a forward-looking approach that determines what workforce will be needed to deliver the organisation’s medium- and long-term strategy.

It is not simply about forecasting headcount. The approach helps anticipate:

• which roles are likely to evolve, emerge or become less needed;
• which skills will become critical;
• workforce requirements in terms of numbers;
• gaps between available and required skills;
• the actions needed to close those gaps.

SWP therefore directly connects HR strategy with the organisation’s business priorities. It enables companies to move from a largely reactive approach to workforce management towards a more forward-looking one.

Strategic transformation rarely affects organisational structures alone. It also changes activities, roles and the skills required to carry them out.

Strategic Workforce Planning helps organisations measure these changes objectively before they turn into operational pressures.

The approach helps answer very practical questions: Which skills will be needed in three or five years? Where are shortages likely to emerge? Which roles will change significantly? Which capabilities can be developed internally, and which will need to be recruited externally?

This ability to anticipate future roles and skills makes it possible to choose earlier between recruitment, mobility, training or organisational change.

The starting point for SWP is the organisation’s strategy: changes in business activities, international expansion, digital transformation, automation, artificial intelligence, a new business model or a new organisational structure.

We then assess the implications of these strategic choices for the workforce: required headcount, roles affected, critical skills and available capabilities.

Comparing the current situation with the target state helps identify the gaps that need to be addressed and build different scenarios based on possible developments. The aim is not to produce a fixed forecast, but to give the organisation a framework that informs its decisions despite uncertainty.

Not all roles are affected in the same way by transformation.

Strategic Workforce Planning identifies the roles likely to undergo the most significant changes and the skills whose availability will become strategically important to the organisation.

This analysis can cover both workforce numbers and the nature of the skills required: Which capabilities are already available? Which are becoming obsolete? Which can be developed? Which will require external recruitment?

Where organisations want to take this approach further, a Skills-Based Organisation (SBO) model makes it possible to focus more on the skills available and deployable across the organisation, rather than relying solely on jobs or job titles.

An assessment only creates value if it leads to decisions. Based on the gaps identified, Strategic Workforce Planning helps organisations build different scenarios and assess their implications for the workforce, skills and the main HR processes and investments.

Several levers can be combined:

• Develop internal skills: put upskilling or reskilling programmes in place to prepare employees for future activities.
• Develop career pathways: create bridges between roles and develop internal mobility where skills can be transferred from one activity to another.
• Recruit missing capabilities: identify needs that are hard to fill internally early enough to secure strategic hires.
• Adapt the organisation: adjust roles, processes or the allocation of activities where transformation fundamentally changes how the organisation operates.

The approach also makes it possible to assess the financial implications of these scenarios, including changes to payroll costs, recruitment needs, departures, training investment and mobility programmes. This helps leadership teams compare options and build a realistic action plan.

“The purpose of SWP is simple: to have the right skills, in the right place, at the right time to meet the organisation’s strategic priorities.”

Audrey Klieber, Employment & Skills Director, Alixio Group

Both approaches share the same objective: anticipating changes in jobs and skills.

Workforce and Skills Planning structures this anticipation within the organisation’s employment and skills policy and its employee relations context. Strategic Workforce Planning offers a more targeted view, directly linked to business scenarios, future workforce requirements and strategic decision-making.

The two approaches can therefore complement each other: Strategic Workforce Planning highlights possible future scenarios and emerging gaps, while Workforce and Skills Planning helps translate this anticipation into employment, skills and career policies.