Workforce planning is a process that organizations use to analyze, forecast, and plan workforce supply and demand, assess gaps, and determine target talent management interventions to ensure that the organization has the right people with the right skills in the right places at the right time to fulfill its mandate and strategic objectives. It is a core business process that aligns changing organizational needs with people strategy. The primary goal of workforce planning is to create a strategy for staffing needs that ensures an organization can meet strategic objectives both now and in the future.

The following are the stages involved in workforce planning:

• Strategic Direction: Understand key mission goals and future objectives set by organization leadership and how the workforce needs to be aligned to achieve them.
• Current State: Understand the current workforce and how it is projected to change over time, due to attrition and other trends.
• Future State: Understand the gaps between workforce demand and supply and define top priority gaps with the greatest impact on organizational performance.
• Interventions: Identify the appropriate workforce interventions and activities to close identified workforce gaps and enable the organization to meet its strategic goals.
• Monitor and Evaluate: Monitor the performance of solutions and their impact on the gaps they were designed to address and continuously improve the solutions to maximize their effectiveness.

Effective workforce planning enables organizations to align workforce requirements directly to the agencys strategic and annual business plans, develop a comprehensive picture of where gaps exist between competencies the workforce currently possesses and future competency requirements, identify and implement gap reduction strategies, and make decisions about how best to structure the organization and deploy the workforce.

Workforce planning allows companies to understand and design their workforce effectively and efficiently with long-term objectives in mind. It prevents problems from developing and allows management to spot issues early, creating plans to remedy them.