Strategic workforce planning is essential for effective talent management, ensuring businesses have the right people in place to meet their goals. This blog explores how to approach workforce planning by first analyzing the current workforce and aligning it with business objectives.
Organizations today are under constant pressure to adapt, innovate and stay ahead of the competition — all while ensuring they have the right team members in place to make it happen. But hiring more staff or reacting to immediate talent shortages isn’t enough. Businesses need a forward-thinking strategy that aligns their workforce with both current goals and future ambitions.
This is where strategic workforce planning (SWP) comes in. SWP goes beyond traditional staffing methods by providing a structured, proactive approach to talent management. It helps organizations anticipate future workforce needs, address skill gaps, and align human capital with long-term business objectives. By focusing on the right talent in the right roles at the right time, companies can strengthen their competitive edge and navigate an evolving marketplace with confidence.
In this article, we’ll explore how strategic workforce planning works, why it’s worth the effort, and how your organization can start implementing a more thoughtful and data-driven approach to talent management. Whether you’re facing high turnover, struggling with skills shortages, or preparing for growth, SWP offers a roadmap to build a resilient and future-ready workforce.
What Is Strategic Workforce Planning?
Strategic workforce planning is the deliberate approach to assuring the right talent is in the right place, at the right time, and with the right experience, skills and competencies to support and enable your short-term goals and long-term objectives. It results from evolving talent supply and readiness strategies into a more sophisticated model that provides greater insight into the workforce.
Gartner explains that workforce planning can range from the least sophisticated to the most sophisticated methods. The beginning of the continuum can be as simple as staff planning based on the volume of work, the type(s) of work, and the quantity of work each person can produce, and then guaranteeing there are enough employees of each type to execute.
It considers factors like seasonal hiring and turnover (actual and historical trends) and provides talent acquisition professionals with the information they need to ensure hiring targets reflect actual and projected needs. This process can apply to production-oriented businesses and can be effective when output is easily measurable and job requirements remain consistent. It’s a relatively simple math equation based on actual and forecasted data.
Strategic workforce planning is at the other end of the continuum, using a multidimensional approach. It goes beyond simple hiring plans by ensuring close collaboration between business leaders and human capital teams. According to McKinsey, organizations that implement this collaboration see higher total shareholder returns than those that don’t.
This integration helps human capital teams stay in sync with both short- and long-term business goals, leading to more substantial results because decisions are based on deeper insights into the workforce. Think of it like playing chess instead of checkers — you’re planning several moves ahead, considering different scenarios, and preparing for what might happen next.
Is Strategic Workforce Planning Worth the Effort?
Strategic workforce planning isn’t simply about hiring — it’s about building a talent strategy that supports your business goals while staying flexible in a changing world.
Making plans to create new products or enter new markets is irrelevant without either understanding the talent required to design, implement, and maintain the strategy or identifying and addressing the talent gaps to provide a workforce that is ready and able to drive and support the business strategies.
SWP can also ensure the organization remains nimble in the face of rapid change, both externally, as market dynamics shift, and internally, as jobs change, evolve or are created. SWP can effectively solve for a number of human capital challenges, including:
- Skills gaps and misaligned competencies. SWP requires examining business needs and comparing them to the current talent in the workforce. Identifying gaps in knowledge, skills and competencies allows learning and development interventions to be designed and deployed.
- Employee retention struggles and high turnover rates. According to Quantum Workplace, employees leave organizations when they lack career growth, experience low compensation, or because they feel undervalued. Understanding areas with high turnover through SWP allows organizations to implement strategies that enhance employee retention and support succession planning, thereby reducing disruptions in leadership and maintaining operational continuity.
- Gaps in succession planning lead to leadership disruptions. SWP includes succession planning, which exposes gaps in career ladders (growth jobs) or in ready-now or ready-soon talent. This approach allows the appropriate combination of internal development and external hiring strategies.
- Rapid market changes requiring an agile workforce. A consistent threat in an organization’s SWOT analysis is the pace of change. Products, processes and technology are changing rapidly, meaning jobs, skills and competencies must rapidly evolve as well. The danger of complacency has never been greater.
- Workforce and business misalignment. SWP requires ongoing communication to ensure alignment between business strategies and workforce needs. With the pace of change this can’t be an annual “check the box” exercise, but it requires ongoing dialogue and periodic review.
SWP allows a deliberate process- and program-oriented approach to compare business and talent strategies against current and forecasted talent so you can identify and solve gaps through effective human capital programs.
To take advantage of the benefits of great talent management, you need to start implementing strategic workforce planning now. But where to begin?
7 Steps to Approaching Strategic Workforce Planning
Implementing strategic workforce planning requires a step-by-step approach tailored to your organization’s unique needs. Whether you’re starting a new process or refining an existing one, these key steps will help you build a workforce strategy that aligns with your business goals and adapts to changing market conditions.
Depending on where your organization is in your strategic workforce planning, you may need to complete all, many or few of these steps. But it is worthwhile to review each.
1. Understand the Short- and Long-Term Business Strategies
Understanding short- and long-term business strategies means looking beyond immediate hiring needs to anticipate future workforce demands. This involves collaborating closely with business leaders to grasp key strategic goals, such as market expansion, product launches, or adopting new technologies.
By aligning workforce planning with these goals, organizations can proactively identify the skills and roles needed at different stages, making sure the right talent is in place when it’s most critical to business success.
For example, a current client aims to double its size in the next five years. Another client is creating a new product that will go live in a few years. Understanding the specifics of the growth plan — such as new products, new markets, the implementation of new technology, and more — the skills and competencies required, and when they are needed, is a critical first step.
If a new product takes two years to develop, strong leadership, product development, and technology may be immediate needs, but you may not need the sales team until later.
2. Analyze Your Current Workforce
It is important to next take an “inventory” of your workforce, looking at technical and functional skills and the leadership competencies required. What are your workforce’s strengths? Where are the weaknesses? Where do you have gaps, either in functional knowledge or leadership? For our client looking to double its size, its growth plans will only exacerbate gaps in the current workforce.
According to a LinkedIn Workplace Learning Report, 90 percent of global executives plan to maintain or increase their investment in learning and development. Conducting a workforce analysis helps companies make informed decisions about training, development programs, and external hiring needs, establishing that the organization can scale efficiently while staying competitive.
3. Align Your Workforce with Business Goals
Once you know what you need, when you need it, and what you have, including current gaps, you can align the current workforce with your business strategy. This means mapping critical roles and key employees to strategic priorities, ensuring top talent focuses on what drives the most value. Consider creating cross-functional teams or assigning high-potential employees to pivotal projects where their skills can have the greatest impact.
Since business goals are dynamic, this alignment process should be ongoing. Regular reviews can help establish that talent deployment evolves alongside shifting market conditions and organizational strategies. This approach benefits both the organization and employees by offering meaningful development opportunities and career growth, fostering engagement and retention.
4. Forecast Future Workforce Needs
Earlier, we discussed projecting workforce needs based on actual and anticipated turnover. For SWP, it’s the same idea but with added dimensions of skills and abilities, anticipated industry shifts, business expansion, and more to identify talent needs. A forward-looking “talent pro forma” becomes essential, allowing organizations to model different scenarios and adjust plans accordingly.
If a company expands into a new market, how critical is local knowledge vs. someone knowing your culture and operations? Assuming it’s a blend, which roles require someone who knows the market and has cultivated important relationships, and which roles would benefit from someone who can help the team navigate processes and the formal and informal ways things get done?
Research from the World Economic Forum predicts that by 2025, half of all employees will need reskilling due to technological advancements. Incorporating this type of industry insight into workforce planning helps ensure that your organization is ready to adapt, grow and thrive in an ever-changing business environment.
5. Develop and Retain Talent
Talent gaps are natural and expected, so the next step is determining how to fill the gaps through a combination of development and retention strategies. Job-specific training, upskilling and reskilling, leadership development, and mentor programs can help fill gaps and provide opportunities that foster engagement and retention.
With strategic workforce planning, it’s important to recognize that these are not quick solutions but require an ongoing investment of time and money as employees change roles, get promoted, leave the organization, join the organization, or as jobs are created or evolve. The focus on continuous development is an important cultural component of companies with strong SWP programs in place.
Providing opportunities for individuals through SWP helps with engagement and retention and helps define the company’s culture as one that invests in its talent and provides new and challenging opportunities for its top performers. Combined with competitive compensation packages, a culture of growth, development and investment creates a compelling reason to stay with the organization, allowing you to retain more of its future leaders.
6. Plan for Succession
Many organizations are doing at least some level of succession planning, even if it’s only at the executive level. Strategic workforce planning looks beyond senior leadership roles, focusing on developing employees at all levels. It helps them build a wide range of skills and experiences so they’re ready to take on future organizational challenges. Identifying potential successors for roles both vertically (promotions) and horizontally (for greater breadth of knowledge) is imperative.
Since SWP requires planning for the future, it is entirely possible that some talent management and succession planning discussions are for roles that may not even exist yet. While growth is a good thing for the organization, it is important to understand that growth dilutes the talent pool by pulling high performers out of their current roles to lead new initiatives or by requiring more from them due to business demands. That dilution — lack of adequate successors for the roles — can also mean you identify individuals as potential successors for multiple roles.
Even if there’s no immediate need, you should consider potential future scenarios and identify backup candidates for key roles — even if that means planning to hire externally when the time comes. Once again, this shows the chess vs. checkers mentality, understanding the various possibilities and their implications.
7. Continuously Adapt
Finally, it is important to make SWP a regular business practice. As business needs change, as you create or discontinue strategies, and as talent joins, learns, develops, and moves through the organization, the workforce plan needs to evolve to remain relevant. HR Business Partners play a critical role here, bridging business leaders, talent acquisition, and learning and development teams to ensure the plan remains relevant and actionable.
Regular check-ins with business leaders help keep workforce planning on track by providing insight into emerging business priorities. Scheduling periodic strategy sessions can uncover potential talent gaps before they become critical issues.
A great example comes from companies that successfully navigated industry disruptions through proactive workforce planning. For instance, during the COVID-19 pandemic, businesses in sectors like healthcare and logistics rapidly adjusted hiring, training and role deployments to meet urgent needs, demonstrating how adaptive SWP can strengthen an organization’s resilience.
By implementing these critical steps, organizations can develop a proactive approach to talent management that addresses current workforce needs and prepares them for future challenges and opportunities.
Move Forward With Strategic Workforce Planning
Strategic workforce planning is not a luxury — it’s a necessity for organizations striving to remain competitive and resilient. By following a structured approach, you can align talent strategies with your organization’s evolving goals, bridge skill gaps, and prepare for future challenges.
While it requires ongoing effort, the payoff is clear: a more agile, future-ready workforce that can adapt to change and drive long-term success. Start today by evaluating your organization’s current state, setting clear workforce goals, and building a roadmap toward a stronger, more capable team.
Ready to start with strategic workforce planning, but you’re not sure where to begin? Our CIO and CHRO experts are here to guide you through every step. Contact us