Future-focused HR: The shift from workforce planning to workforce intelligence

There’s no question that we are at an inflection point where work is shifting dramatically. Largely driven by technology disruption and the rapid uptake of AI, organisations are reimagining how work gets done and the possibilities seem endless. The deployment of AI is fundamentally changing the nature of work, and with that, business models are demanding a redesign. Adam Lambert, London Head of Employment at Shoosmiths LLP, adds to this, “businesses have seen enormous changes over the past decade. Advancing technology continues irreversible change, including the fundamental changes in employment law, which have implications for how we manage our workforce”.

The strategic challenge for our profession is how we influence the direction of travel through organisational redesign that ensures business operating models support performance and are future fit. But organisations cannot credibly redesign work, integrate AI or build future operating models without a clear view of the capabilities they will need, and many are currently planning too narrowly to do this well. 

CIPD 2024 data shows, when planning and taking action on current and future workforce requirements, the majority (66%) are planning up to 1 year ahead of which 13% are only looking to the next quarter. With fewer than a fifth of businesses planning beyond two-year cycles, building a future vision when the people requirements aren’t clear becomes extremely challenging. These findings signal a critical business risk. 

Capability fast becoming one of the key constraints on business transformation and growth

Whilst many organisations aspire to be more capability driven, the current reality is falling short of this. Organisations may have the ambition to evolve operating models, but without a clear understanding of the capabilities they have — and the capabilities they will need — investment decisions become reactive, fragmented and vulnerable to short-term pressures. 

Some of the common barriers to being more skills based include immature skills intelligence and poor-quality or insufficient data around current and future skill needs. CIPD survey data from 2024 shows only 38% collect data to identify skills gaps within their organisation, whilst less than a third (31%) use data to inform future skill requirements. Poor skills forecasting presents a strategic risk that can result in numerous consequences, for example less effective talent management strategy, increased hiring costs and reduced organisational performance where skills gaps are not met. Lambert adds, “businesses are very much aware of the rate of change and the need to consider the impact on future resourcing. Unintended consequences of this could include a greater risk of disputes over performance expectations”.

Investing in foresight planning to build future vision

CIPD’s article on horizon scanning demonstrates the importance of foresight planning for strategic decision making. Whilst not every element of the organisation’s future vision will be clear to a high degree of confidence, especially given the pace of change, ambiguity paralysis isn’t the solution. Business leaders need to work to best fit future assumptions and build a concise narrative of where the business is heading in x years (based on the organisation’s planning cycles). What assumptions can you make with a high degree of confidence, and which assumptions are clear unknowns that need to be paused from future planning? 

Organisations who are building their foresight and future planning capability are investing in:

• experimentation (e.g. running HR/people pilots alongside technology pilots to identify people considerations before the new technology is introduced to the business)
• dedicated forecast insights teams
• scenario stress testing to map how the business decisions made today will
• impact on the future business state
• exploring the impact of external pressures on the organisation (e.g.
• external labour market trends).

Skill forecasting and workforce planning

Building a future vision allows businesses to pre-empt and plan for, plausible scenarios. These scenarios become the foundation to determine people risks and consequences to support strategic planning for effective decision making. Forecasting is no longer a niche HR activity, but a vital lever for identifying business critical capability, address future talent gaps and minimise people risks. It provides the mechanism to interpret external pressures, test future of work assumptions and translate plausible scenarios to people strategy that impacts upon skills, capability and business models. 

Forecasting models and methodologies can be categorised into three main areas:

1. Supply based models - to determine the number of staff available at a particular time
2. Demand based models - to predetermine future service and demand requirements
3. Need based models - to determine future workforce needs

Frequent modelling approaches can include qualitative, time series, optimisation, mathematical, stock-and-flow and simulation models. (For a full review of workforce forecasting models see Safarishahrbijari, 2018.)

Building internal skills intelligence 

Organisations that are focused on developing their internal skills intelligence are developing skills taxonomies to assess current “as is state” against their future “to be state”.

Building skills intelligence and skills taxonomies allows businesses to:

• align skills (not job roles) to work streams and projects more fluidly 
  deploy skills across the organisation
• make best use of scare expertise
• utilise transferable skills
• assess upskilling and reskilling needs when workforce planning against current state to future state.

The ESCOE UK skills taxonomy provides a data driven solution to measure the demand and supply of skills within the UK workforce and provides a robust example of a large scale skills taxonomy in practice. 

Implications for HR 

Future planning isn’t an HR initiative, it’s an organisational system that should operate in a dynamic way to continually review the business’s position on future opportunities and risks, and the subsequent strategic trade-offs. Fundamentally, it’s about agreeing your priorities, backed by evidence: “If everything is a priority then nothing is. If you want stand out results [for building future capability] you need to be intentional and make tough calls about what is more important.” Chief People Officer

For the profession, this means moving from the traditional annual workforce planning to dynamic intelligence gathering to help support the business make better choices under uncertainty. We achieve this by bringing together different threads of intelligence, such as business strategy, operating models, workforce data, labour market insight, technology roadmaps and employee capability data, to influence today’s decisions that will impact on the organisation of tomorrow. 

This isn’t about predicting the future perfectly but instead making workforce risks and capability choices visible to the rest of the business. HR can be a valuable support to the business to move beyond reactive planning to future-facing workforce strategy.

Future ready organisations won’t be those with the most detailed workforce plans, but it will be those who have a clear understanding of which capabilities matter most and how they redesign and strategically plan based on this intelligence. Capability-led workforce planning can help organisations invest more deliberately, redeploy talent more effectively and make clearer choices about where human capability will create the greatest value. In an environment where work is being redesigned at pace, capability intelligence may just become one of the most important sources of competitive advantage.

Further reading

Guide: Strategic workforce planning
Tools: L&D tools: A performance-led approach to skills and capability planning
Podcast: The journey towards a skills-based organisation
CIPD's future of work article series: Insights for senior leaders on the drivers of change
Shoosmiths Employment Law Update | Spring 2026
Shoosmiths AI governance report
World Economic Forum white paper: Four futures of jobs in the new economy: AI and talent in 2030