Strategic workforce planning: Guide for people professionals

This guide introduces you to workforce planning and provides you with an overview of how to do it. It examines the key stages involved in workforce planning and offers a practical structure for determining your strategy, with illustrative examples to guide practice.

We’ll show you how to develop a workforce plan by walking you through two methodologies for workforce planning: a six-stage planning framework and a seven ‘rights’ principle. The planning framework offers six stages for conducting workforce planning in the right order; the seven ‘rights’ principle lists seven areas of the business that you need to consider. 

People practitioners can use this guide to structure their (strategic) workforce planning, to identify the workforce challenges they may face ahead of time, and to put in place the appropriate actions to ensure organisational readiness and success.