How To Do Workforce Planning: An Overview

Let's plan for 5 years down the road with a thousand moving pieces - many of which you have 0 control over. That's strategic workforce planning.

I have had a growing interest in workforce planning with the rise of AI. I don't want to be doing miserable HR - like mass layoffs when you didn't plan for the shift in 30% of tasks to AI.

My guest this week, Ross Sparkman, has literally wrote the book on strategic workforce planning. When you google 'workforce planning books' his book, 'Strategic Workforce Planning: Developing optimized talent strategies for future growth' comes up and the 2nd edition is out this week! He is currently the Sr. Director of Workforce Planning at Walmart and held similar roles at Nike and Meta.

It's complicated, but we need to plan for the future:

What roles and skills do we need now? In the future? When in the future?

What risks impact our plans? And how will we mitigate?

Do we have the right mix of full-time, part-time and contingent workers?

Are we hiring in the right places?

And so many more. Workforce planning is the pinnacle of big picture HR. Ross tells us how to do it in the short-term and then how to scale up to the bigger picture.

Check it out! And read the book - I can hardly think of another topic where reading the book would be more important.

0:00 Intro
1:05 What is Workforce Planning?
2:31 Organization Size
3:52 Short-Term Workforce Planning
6:23 The Cadence
8:15 Long-Term Workforce Planning
10:25 Influence of External Factors
13:34 Managing Risks
18:06 The Fit with Other HR
21:29 Changes in Workforce Planning
25:01 Learn More

Find Ross' new book on Amazon! It's available April 17, 2025
Strategic Workforce Planning: Developing optimized talent strategies for future growth

You can find Ross on LinkedIn   / ross-sparkman  

You can find me https://thehrhub.ca/
or on Linkedin   / andrea-adams1