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#RecruitmentFocus: Workforce planning - designing jobs for the future
To build a workforce that ignites innovation and better meets the changing expectations of your customers, business leaders must embrace a strategic approach to planning. The external environment is changing so rapidly that workforce planning should be an ongoing process that can give the HR function a key role at the table and a strategic position within the business.
In addition to regularly undertaking a strategic workforce planning process, it's important to ensure that the organisation has the right skills and behaviours to adapt to market changes in a dynamic manner. A growing number of companies, both inside and outside the technology sector, are in a furious race to attract people with rapidly evolving, highly specialised technical skill sets related to artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, data science, machine learning, and natural language processing. Some of the talent in these areas is so specialised and scarce that companies are willing to acquire entire firms for just a few people.
While technical skills will certainly be critical in the digital economy, they are only part of the formula for success. Comapnies will also need people to show up with the ‘soft skills’ needed to connect with customers and collaborate with one another. In fact, these skills have become more critical in the digital age, not less.
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Workforce planning in the digital age will require more than just closing an organisations most urgent skills gaps. You will need to step back and think about how your organisation needs to change to keep up with the escalating expectations of your customers.
1. Examine your overall organisational and leadership structure.
What are the organisational and leadership skills you will need to meet your business goals? Look closely at your leadership structure and the people in those roles. Particularly if you've had low turnover or relied heavily on a culture of mainly promoting from within, you may find your biggest obstacles to adapting to change are sitting at the top of your organisation. And if nobody on your leadership team has been through a digital transformation, who can show your company the way?
2. Consider how you can best fill high-value, emerging roles.
Do you already have those skills internally? Do you have a people analytics driven process to identify people who have the potential for building those skills? If not, are you setting up in locations that will provide rich talent pools and be attractive to the people you would need to hire? Do your learning and development programmes support and incentivise your people to develop their skills for the jobs of tomorrow?
3. Consider people's competencies and skills holistically.
Adopt a talent model that evaluates the totality of the person's experience to determine how his or her skills will translate into business value. For example, is the value of someone who knows Python but doesn't understand how your business makes money equivalent to the value of someone who may not have the programming language skill set but understands your business?
4. Replace the career ladder with the climbing wall.
Employees don't just move vertically up a ladder at an organisation anymore. As you develop your people strategy, think about skills and competencies in terms of a climbing wall. This is a much more apt metaphor in the digital age for understanding the way' that people grow their skills through the life-cycle of their career. They move up but also over, acquiring new skills or experience. Make sure your rewards programme is flexible enough to accommodate these kinds of moves.
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