Future Workforce Planning - Building a Future-Ready Organization Using a Prospective Study Approach

Abstract To stay competitive in a rapidly changing world, it is imperative to rethink the business model, workforce, and skills with the future in mind. This is a forward-looking approach to imagine the different potential scenarios of the future and use that as a frame to design the how it will impact the business. With this ‘future’ as the vision, a back casting approach was adopted to then anticipate the changes needed today to help to transform the business successfully into the desired Future-Ready organization. This prospective study is done based mainly on qualitative research. An external "prospectivist" (Future analyst) was engaged to work with the HR team to conduct this study. A series of external and internal research, as well as internal interviews with business leaders were conducted to imagine the potential business scenarios of the future. A backcasting strategy was then adopted to compare the current workforce and to anticipate the required evolution of the business, workforce, and competencies. An innovative approach was adopted using big data for external competency benchmarking. Business leaders from each business were involved in the early stages from choosing the external sectors to benchmark against and the internal key jobs to be benchmarked, to reflecting collectively on the results to design action plans. Other than the direct interventions for each business, the results were reviewed at a macro level to create a Future Workforce Plan for the organization. Further interviews and discussions with management leaders to review the key findings had created specific manpower and HR action plans to develop the workforce. These short and mid-term action plans provide the blueprint not only for workforce planning but to set the course on developing the workforce of the future that can steer the business transformations. The scope includes identifying job evolutions, workforce reskilling and upskilling needs, potential new jobs for the future (not existent in the company) and approaches to build the workforce (external recruitment - social communities, upskilling of employees, outsourcing - gig workforce).