Workforce planning is the backbone of successful human capital management. At its core, it ensures that organizations have the right people with the right skills in the right place and time to achieve their goals. 

Forecasting workforce needs and developing appropriate strategies can help organizations achieve their goals, improve productivity, and reduce costs. 

The key elements of workforce planning include: 

• Analysis of current and future business and workforce requirements. 
• Assessment of current workforce skills, competencies, and demographics. 
• Identification of future workforce needs and skills gaps. 
• Strategies to address workforce gaps, including recruitment, training, and retention. 
• Implementation of workforce plans and ongoing monitoring and evaluation. 

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, strategic workforce planning has become crucial to organizational success. With AI, organizations can leverage data and analytics to make more informed and accurate decisions about their workforce. 

Simplify Strategic Workforce Planning with AI 

85% of the jobs in 2030 are yet to exist today! 

Companies must plan for employee skill changes and professional growth. This requires ‘predicting the unpredictable.’ 

Artificial intelligence mechanisms facilitate identifying existing skills and their potential development. 

150 years’ worth of HR work – done in 1 hour. 

It would be time-consuming for workforce planning teams to analyze 10,000 employees with 2,000 opportunities, which amounts to 20 million matches. 

AI algorithms can reduce the time spent and replace the workforce planning team’s intuition. 

Benefits of AI Integration on Workforce Planning 

AI-driven platforms provide workforce planning teams with these benefits: 

• Improved accuracy and reliability: AI algorithms can analyze vast amounts of data and identify patterns that humans may be unable to detect, leading to accurate and reliable workforce planning. 

• Faster decision-making: AI algorithms can process data much faster than humans, allowing organizations to make quicker and more informed workforce decisions. 
• Optimization of performance: By identifying workforce gaps and needs, AI-driven workforce planning can help organizations optimize workforce performance, increasing productivity, efficiency, and profitability. 

For example, IBM’s AI-powered system identifies and provides high-potential employees with a personalized development plan and real-time feedback to managers. As a result, IBM saw increased employee engagement, retention, and productivity. 

• Alignment with business strategy: AI-driven workforce planning can ensure organizations have the right talent, skills, and competencies to achieve their business goals and objectives. 

For example, Walmart’s system analyzed store data, such as foot traffic and sales, to predict staffing needs and schedule employees accordingly. As a result, Walmart saw improved customer satisfaction, reduced labor costs, and increased employee satisfaction. 

How to Conduct AI-Driven Strategic Workforce Planning 

As per a survey, only 46% of employers use data to identify skills gaps, and 36% collect data to predict employee skills and knowledge needs. However, only 33% of HR leaders think their organizations use data effectively for workforce planning. 

AI can be an excellent tool to align strategic goals and objectives by providing data-driven insights and predictions to help organizations make informed decisions about their workforce. 

1. Comprehend your organization and its environment: Identify your company’s environment and culture, including team dynamics and management-employee relations.

Hiring people who don’t fit your culture could hurt your team’s productivity. 

In a small business, hiring requires careful planning and consideration of how new hires will fit into your teams and workplace. 

2. Define your organization’s strategic objectives: Before using AI for workforce planning, understand your organization’s strategic goals and objectives to determine what skills, knowledge, and abilities you need in your workforce to achieve those goals.
3. Evaluate your existing and potential workforce: Assess your employees’ strengths, weaknesses, skills, interests, and potential to determine what external skills and competencies your company needs and how they will benefit from it.

Analyze your organizational structure with demographic data. AI can help you identify skills gaps and areas to invest in training and development. 

Compare workforce skills to competency evaluations to define your starting point. 

4. Predict your workforce needs: Using data analysis and machine learning algorithms, AI can help predict future needs and identify trends and patterns to help you accurately predict future workforce needs.
5. Develop a workforce plan: Based on AI-generated insights, you can develop a workforce plan outlining the actions you need to take to ensure you have the right talent to achieve your strategic goals.

This plan should include strategies for talent acquisition, training and development, and succession planning. 

Determine how you’ll combat the lack of job seekers, stay ahead of your competitors, and address industry-unsuitable skills. Consider what you’ll do if you have more employees with the same skills and knowledge but few compatible projects and tasks. 

6. Monitor and adjust your workforce planning: Consider future workload, shortages, needs, and skills imbalances to determine the best hiring methods to fill these gaps and meet urgent needs.

This includes identifying changes in strategic priorities, objectives, and missions. It also involves new programs, training, and work that may affect your workforce’s workload and skills. 

Technology changes affect skills and work. Customer expectations affect processes, production, and delivery times, affecting your workforce. 

Best Practices for AI-Driven Strategic Workforce Planning 

1. Foster a culture of collaboration, transparency, and inclusivity – Involve key stakeholders in the workforce planning process, such as HR, finance, operations, and business unit leaders. Create a cross-functional team to ensure that all perspectives are represented, and everyone has a voice in the process. 
2. Encourage continuous learning and improvement – Invest in ongoing learning and development, measure and analyze the effectiveness of AI-driven workforce planning to identify improvement areas, and use insights to refine workforce planning. 
3. Balance AI and human decision-making – Define roles and responsibilities for the AI and humans and foster a culture of trust and collaboration between the AI and humans. 
4. Integrate workforce planning with business strategy – Use the insights from AI-driven workforce planning to shape the business strategy. Monitor and adjust the plan to ensure alignment with the business strategy. 

Workforce planning solution from Draup analyses over 10 Mn data points daily across 33 industries and 4 Mn+ career paths. It provides insights into the Ecosystem at emerging locations and Archetype analysis of specific companies.