Strategic Workforce Planning

What Is It?

Our unique approach to generating intelligence that can inform your organisation of the likely impacts of both internal and external factors on skills and labour acquisition and retention. Enabling your organisation to be resilient to structural and cultural changes, better positioning itself for the future.

We offer a range of products and services designed to meet your individual requirements, circumstances, timescales and budget.

Over the past decade we have supported over 40 energy, utility and infrastructure companies, both within the UK and overseas, with designing and implementing their workforce renewal and talent attraction strategies.

How Can We Help You

1. Training Courses

Our workforce planning training programme is designed to upskill HR professionals in the fundamentals of designing and implementing a tailored workforce planning approach within their own organisations.

We offer a one-day upskilling programme as well as a two-day Level 3 accredited Certificate in Workforce Planning (minimum of six delegates).

Both the one-day and two-day courses can be delivered either in a closed setting (with delegates from a single organisation) or open to delegates from a range of organisations (either within the same sector or from across a range of different sectors).

2. Providing labour market intelligence

When developing a workforce renewal strategy, it is important for every organisation to consider its external operating environment:

We currently have the tightest labour market in over 40 years
There is continued intense competition for talent from across the infrastructure sector
The supply of new talent is struggling to meet current demand
Population demographics are changing, including age profile and greater ethnic diversity

We have access to all of the UK’s major sources of labour market intelligence and the expertise to analyse and deliver it in a way that complements your existing workforce planning strategy.

3. Developing, implementing and supporting your own workforce planning approach

Central to our approach to strategic workforce planning is being flexible enough to design a solution that fits each individual business – whatever its sector, size or budget.

However sophisticated your requirements – from simple data analytics and benchmarking to delivering a comprehensive workforce planning solution for each function within your business group – we will develop a solution which ensures that the right questions are asked of both your HR data and business in order to deliver new insights with the minimum of fuss, leaving your business confident in its plans whatever the future may hold.

4. Sector-wide workforce planning

Collaboration can be a crucial aspect of any sector’s talent attraction strategy. We have been supporting Great Britain’s electricity and gas transmission and distribution businesses in developing their regulatory workforce renewal plans since 2006.

We can support and deliver collaborative workforce planning exercise either:

Horizontally – across a range of peer companies (e.g. asset owners)
Vertically – down through the supply chain

We aim to meet every customer’s specific requirements, so if there are elements of each of the above services that you are interested in, we would be happy to discuss your individual requirements.

What are the benefits?

We begin by understanding your current workforce – how many people you employ and what they do, where they do it, etc. – and segment the workforce in a way that will maximise the value of workforce planning. We will then build a range of scenarios depicting when vacancies may be created within each workforce segment, such as retirements, staff turnover, and current and future headcount growth/reductions.

A range of resourcing strategies can then be developed which will utilise a range of fully-costed entry routes, and lead-times to competency, into your business. This process will allow us to consider and target all of the available pools of labour at your disposal – including internal career pathways, trainee-based schemes and various aspects of the external labour market – and to compare and contrast the costs and benefits of each approach.

What’s more, because we do this for each job role within each workforce segment individually, we can easily model any predicted changes in headcount over the coming years as well as the redeployment of staff from one workforce segment to another.

Finally, we will place your talent and resourcing challenges within the proper context of the labour market’s ability to supply the skills you need – be it local, regional, national or international.