The New Frontier of Strategic Workforce Planning

This week, I had the opportunity to keynote at the SWP Conference in London, and I wanted to share a few key insights from the discussion. Strategic Workforce Planning is entering a completely new frontier. Across industries, companies are accelerating their demand for tech and digital roles—even as overall job postings slow meaningfully. The S&P vs. US Job Postingsand FTSE vs. UK Job Postings charts (pages 3–4) clearly show that labor demand has now decoupled from market performance. At the same time, AI job postings continue to surge (page 5), and enabling functions such as Cloud, Cybersecurity, Legal, and Data Engineering remain essential (page 6).

A major theme that surfaced repeatedly was skills clarity. The scatterplot on page 7 shows that companies with well-defined skills in their job descriptions hire nearly twice as efficiently. Combined with the rapid rise of near–Tier 1 hubs (page 8), it’s evident that workforce planning now requires both global precision and operational speed.

We also highlighted the new SWP stack (page 9), which moves planners beyond static dashboards toward Co-Pilots, Multi-Agent Control Planes, task-level redesign, and dynamic skills architectures. This shift is critical as roles converge (page 11) and as the half-life of skills continues to shrink (page 10). The FP&A example on page 13 illustrates how Root Skills, Core Skills, Tech Stack, and AI Models need to be integrated to support modern roles.

Another shift: CFOs are increasingly asking planners to quantify AI’s impact on revenue, margin, and free cash flow, not just headcount. The value-pool framework (page 14) shows how AI unlocks efficiency, drives growth, and reduces risk. And the compensation analysis on page 15 underscores a major warning sign: AI roles are experiencing 35–60% wage growth, while non-AI roles are growing at 10–20%.

The takeaway: Workforce Planning is evolving from a reporting function into an intelligent, agentic system—one capable of redesigning work and shaping organizational strategy at its core.