Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) (or Workforce Planning) is the process that ensures an organisation can have the right people in the right place at the right time to meet their organisational strategy. Talent planning requires an organisation to look at specific challenges taking on board their strategic goals, talent and skills they require, the macro environment, demand from stakeholders, supply of labour and culture of their organisation. Workforce Planning consists of a series of processes and methodologies that connects HR strategy and practices to organisational strategy to ensure the organisation has the right people in the right place at the right time and at the right cost.
Workforce Planning can help organisations stay successful, agile and competitive by providing them with tools to predict with more confidence what their future talent may look like.
Strategic Workforce Planning represents a significant shift in how talent needs are addressed, moving the approach from reactive to one that is fundamentally more proactive, innovative and challenging.
How Can CMCBP Help With Workforce Planning?
Clare has been researching and consulting in Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) (also known as workforce planning) for several years. She has been involved with several Irish Civil Service Departments in helping them develop their workforce plans and assisting with the research required for their reports. Clare was previously engaged in running workforce planning training for all Civil Service Departments. This involved training with senior management and HR leads to introduce the subject and provide guidance on the research required, and with staff from each Department on how to complete their own workforce plan. 
Following on from Clare’s own research she has developed a unique Strategic Workforce Planning model to support organisations who wish to have a guide on their own workforce planning. While this provides a detailed and systematic approach for any organisation to engage with SWP, each organisation has its own unique combination of challenges and culture and therefore the process of integrating SWP into a specialist organisation requires a tailored approach.
How Can CMCBP Help You?
- Design a bespoke workforce planning model for your organisation and how it should be planned, what methodology you can us and how it should be measured and managed
- Train leaders, HR professionals and project teams on workforce planning tools, methodology and implementation best practice
- Support ongoing workforce planning activities providing direction and advice on each step
Training Programme
If you would like to upskill your Workforce Planning team, then CMCBP can run a workshop to create confidence and knowledge in workforce planning. Clare has trained people in workforce planning several times so has first hand experience of what works and where skills needed further work.
The training will be completely designed to support your personal workforce planning model. Please contact CMCBP to receive further information on what the training session may look like. To support the learning each participant would be provided with a workbook which they can use during the training. This workbook will then also provide a reference for when they are ‘back at the desk’. A example of the reading list from the workbook can be seen here
The training workshop would quip participants with skills and aids to create a support group for each other.The training would aid towards building a community of workforce planning practitioners, so they would have each other as a resource to support each other in the future.
Following each workshop, a report will be provided outlining any learning and observations from the workshops. Any recommendations for further initiatives will be shared. Evaluation and feedback from each session will be shared within this report.
If you are interested in contacting CMCBP for more information on SWP, then please call 0044 (0)7594 946166 or email [email protected]