How to Use Skills Data for Workforce Planning

In its simplest form, workforce planning is a “framework for analysing both the current and desired future states of the workforce”, which must be scoped in accordance with business context and strategy. Because of the importance of the business context, there can be no “one size fits all” roadmap to successful workforce planning applicable to all organisations. In this blog we explore the business benefit of skills based workforce planning and how IBM have used internal skills data to infer skills across their workforce.

Building an Effective Skill-Based Workforce Planning Capability

A skills-based approach to workforce planning is becoming increasingly attractive to organisations. Skill availability is well and truly on the CEO’s agenda, with research from McKinsey showing that 79% of CEO’s are concerned about skill availability impacting innovation, cost, quality and growth. In our own research at Insight222 on the future of workforce planning, nearly all companies surveyed expressed a desire to build a skills-based workforce planning process. However, only a quarter of companies were actively doing so. In this article we explore the surging interest in a skills-based approach to workforce planning and how the Insight222 model expands on the traditional, well-known model of workforce planning.

How to Build a Workforce Planning Strategy that Delivers Business Value

Workforce planning is a business activity. It is not an HR activity. In leading companies, workforce planning delivers millions of dollars to the enterprise through predicting where skills and workforce costs will be in the future and how to plan for them in the right locations, while managing existing costs. In research conducted in 2020 across almost 50 global organisations, including in-depth studies of twelve Fortune 500 companies, Insight222 concluded that there are significant factors that leading companies perform when they “do workforce planning well.” Throughout this article we explore the nine dimensions for excellence in workforce planning.

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