If you find value in content like this, sign up for my Talent Edge Weekly newsletter.
In its new series on strategic workforce planning (SWP), Deloitte Insights presents five articles exploring how organizations can conduct SWP more effectively amid uncertainty. The series highlights five major shifts. For each shift, I’ve included a guiding question that each shift requires us to answer:
1) From planning one future → planning for multiple potential futures: How can we design a workforce planning approach that accounts for multiple possible futures, rather than relying on a single forecast or operating model?
2) From planning based on jobs → planning based on skills and work: How can we deconstruct work into tasks and outcomes—not just roles and job titles—and redesign it to combine human and AI capabilities in the most effective way?
3) From focusing on visible talent → unlocking hidden capability and capacity: Where do we have underutilized skills, adjacent capabilities, or trapped capacity that could be redeployed or developed to meet emerging work needs?
4) From static, manual planning → dynamic, AI-driven planning: How can we use AI and real-time workforce signals to continually sense, model, and adjust workforce plans—not just forecast them once a year?
5) From functional silos → horizontal and vertical collaboration: How do we make SWP a shared, data-enabled practice across HR, Finance, Strategy, Technology, and business leaders—rather than one owned by a single function? Each article dives deeper into these areas.
As a bonus, I’m sharing one of my SWP scenario-planning cheat sheets to help determine how workforce plans may need to shift under different future scenarios.
