Workforce planning for a skills-first future

Workforce planning: A quick recap

Workforce planning is the process of forecasting an organization’s long-term labor needs based on market conditions, business strategy, and employee skill gaps. This holistic approach helps you adapt more smoothly to market changes.

Workforce planning can be as straightforward or complex as you need it to be, but expect to include:

• A current breakdown of your employees’ roles, tenures, teams, and skills

• Forecasts of required skill sets 

• Strategies to fill skill gaps (e.g., hiring, training)

Workforce planning is different from headcount and succession planning because it focuses on the skills and capabilities an organization needs over time, rather than simply the number of people required or the continuity of specific roles.

5 ideas to optimize your skills-based workforce planning

According to Isaiah Hankel, Founder of careers consultancy Overqualified, “Traditional workforce planning assumes stable roles [and] predictable career paths.” Yet, career paths are increasingly less predictable due to trends such as quiet quitting, flexible and remote work, and mass layoffs. 

That’s why it’s smarter to execute your workforce planning around skills, not job titles. Forecasting skill needs and gaps lets you make more specific – hence, more effective – plans. As Hankel told us, it “shift[s] workforce planning from reactive to preventative.”

Here are five expert-vetted ways to optimize your skills-based workforce planning.

Conduct continuous market research and auditing

You won’t fall off your chair hearing that workforce planning requires internal auditing and market research. But the keyword here is “continuous.” 

Ongoing data gathering and analysis – as opposed to, say, yearly sprints – ensures you promptly catch both internal and external changes that affect talent acquisition and re-skilling decisions.

Joaquin Rodriguez, Co-Owner of Stay In Costa Rica, notes that demand can be unpredictable. “Traditional workforce planning assumes all employees will provide the same level of service and demand for services will remain consistent,” he says. This isn't useful in hospitality, since “guest expectations and employee capabilities vary greatly.”

Instead, continuous data gathering – on target customers, competitor moves, and macroeconomic factors – creates more accurate short- and long-term forecasts. 

Your internal auditing might therefore include:    

• Top-level business mission, strategy, and goals

• Departments’ skill needs and gaps, labor budgets, and productivity rates

• Employee data such as seniority, tenure, job type, and pay grade

Once you’ve collected the data, devise key questions it can help answer. An important one for Kolb is, “Do we possess the skills to carry out this plan?” Others might include:

• What work is growing faster than our workforce can support?

• Which skills are becoming obsolete or declining in value?

• How long does it take to build critical skills internally?

• Which teams benefit the most from automating workflows?

Hop on the AI train, but wear seatbelts

You may think you don’t need seatbelts on train journeys, but you do if AI is the driver. While useful, AI can augment faulty assumptions in workforce planning while packaging the result as optimal and rational. As Isaiah Hankel says, “AI has changed the speed of workforce planning, but not the quality. [...] Too many organizations are simply using AI to automate their bad assumptions.”

To enjoy a smooth AI train journey, pinpoint where AI tools can enhance your workforce planning. Here are two key use cases. 

1. AI as workforce planning assistant

Your workforce management software might have AI-powered features such as headcount forecasting, or you might use a third-party AI tool. At a minimum, you can feed it your top questions (from the research and auditing step) and check the results for accuracy. You might also use it earlier still to speed up research and clean up company data sets.

The CEO of Metaintro, Lacey Kaelani, gave us these practical examples for AI workforce planning:

• Analyze skills adjacencies (who can be upskilled/promoted into current roles)

• Predict an attrition risk before it becomes an issue

• Predict talent gaps before they block important initiatives

AI tools can also speed up skills-based hiring and reduce bias. For example, TestGorilla’s AI interviewer assesses agreed-upon skills and auto-scores candidate responses. 

Be vigilant, though, because some generative AI (genAI) tools may be less than accurate. As Isaiah Hankel says, “AI is good at telling organizations who might be expensive, risky, or atypical, but very bad at understanding long-term value, adaptability, or institutional resilience.” He adds that this sometimes leads to “companies laying off experience and then scrambling to rehire it later.” 

So, for nuanced, long-term-relevant planning, ensure experts cross-check and interpret AI recommendations, and make final decisions. 

2. AI as workforce component

Your workforce plans themselves will need to account for team workflows that involve AI.

Chandra Donelson, Chief Data and AI Officer at the United States Space Force, predicts that by 2027, “organizations will [...] hire for a set of outcomes that are achieved by a combination of humans and AI agents.” Her vision? “Human talent stays focused on high-value leadership while AI handles the routine.”

During workforce planning, Donelson recommends “breaking down roles into component tasks to decide which are best served by human judgment and which should be automated.”

You might, for example, automate lengthy text-based tasks with AI, such as personalizing 1-on-1 sales emails to thousands of prospects. This AI-as-workforce-component approach comes with low risk and huge savings.

There is a gray area, however. This appears when “AI [...] creates cognitive friction and invisible labor,” as Julika Novkova, Founder at Juls' Psychology, puts it. This includes the need to comprehend, edit, and fact-check AI work, which may take longer than producing the output yourself. Should you decide this cognitive labor is worth the reward, ensure employees with “AI experience” also have “deep subject matter expertise” to avoid costly workflow mistakes.

Turn a skills list into a skills map

A skills map – current and forward-looking – is a must for any workforce planning framework. But resist the temptation to start by listing departments and roles, as this can keep your focus on “business as usual,” while preventing you from seeing opportunities and optimal outcomes. 

Instead, describe and quantify:

• Strategic business goals, such as launching a new product or enhancing employer branding 

• Team-level targets, such as reducing time-to-hire for HR or time-to-market for product

• Critical tasks for each of the above, for example, building new software architecture      

Next, as Joaquin Rodriguez recommends, you should “map skill clusters rather than job titles.”

He gives the example of “someone who speaks three languages, manages guest complaints well, and provides basic property maintenance support [being] far more valuable to us [...] than three people who each perform only their specific job.” In this hospitality example, the skill cluster might be “customer service.” 

How deep you dive into your skills map depends on your team size and goals. That said, the next step is breaking clusters down further. For example, you might:

• Connect inter-dependent skills → Helps enable faster re-skilling and up-skilling (for example, communications skills link to negotiation and language proficiency).

• Map how employees’ skill sets interact across teams and projects → Helps move workers around as capacity and demand change, and streamline succession planning.

• Estimate skill “life spans” → Shorter life spans, like those in genAI content skills, might require more frequent hiring, training, and job redesign.

Finally, connect the dots between your “theoretical” skills mapping exercise and your company’s current and future workforce. Key steps include:

1. Create a skills rating scale (e.g., 1–5, where 1 = Inadequate and 5 = Expert) and apply it to specific teams’ skill sets, or even to individual employees.

2. Describe skill gaps in context. For example, estimate a lack of presentation skills at 50% of the middle management cohort, and forecast it at 20% with up-skilling programs.

3. Quantify effects, not only for gaps (e.g., slow hiring increases cost) but also for optimal scenarios (e.g., critical skill clusters increase revenue).

4. Ensure backup for critical, expert-level skills. Cameron Kolb calls this “skill redundancy”, or having more than one employee capable of performing a crucial task. Skill depth is as important as coverage, he says.

Assess, don’t assume employee skills 

Scoring employees’ skill sets incorrectly can lead to you misidentifying gaps and potentially planning the wrong moves. Equally, real skills that don’t make it onto the map could spell missed opportunities or higher costs. 

Rodriguez shares the example of “having employees on the front desk that had developed a good social media presence.” Instead of hiring a marketing contractor, the company saved money by “leverag[ing] the internal skill sets.”

In another scenario, say you’re reading an employee’s performance review notes. You might assume that they have solid data analysis skills because they led a successful market research project, but how can you be sure? Talent assessment platforms like TestGorilla's can help you measure workers’ hard and soft skill levels at scale. 

Bridge gaps with concrete actions

Planning without action is just wishful thinking. Make sure that, when you identify skill gaps or future-proof skill clusters, you spell out how you’ll address them.

The traditional route is to say, “We’ll hire for X, Y, Z roles.” A broader, context-specific framework is making “build, buy, and borrow” decisions – or the 3 Bs.

Keep workforce planning nimble with skills evaluation software

Skills in the global labor force can shift unexpectedly. For example, think of the skills required for software developers in 2021, before ChatGPT, and then fast forward to 2026. Now imagine extrapolating that across all job types, over the next five years. Traditional tools like Excel sheets and meetings alone simply can’t keep up with skills-based workforce planning. 

So, make your workforce planning real-time and collaborative. Enterprise software like ADP or Ripple can help you forecast labor needs and map team-wide skill sets. But you also need reliable, up-to-date data on what skills your teams actually have. 

TestGorilla can help. You can customize assessments to include five tests for different employee groups, choosing from 350+ skills tests, ranging from role-based to culture-add. These scientifically predict job performance, so you always know where you stand in your workforce planning.

Try TestGorilla for free today.

Contributors

• Cameron Kolb, ExitPros, Exit Advisor and Founder

• Isaiah Hankel, Overqualified, Founder

• Joaquin Rodriguez, Stay In Costa Rica, Co-owner and Sales and Marketing Director

• Lacey Kaelani, Metaintro, CEO

• Chandra Donelson, United States Space Force, Chief Data and AI Officer

• Julika Novkova, Ph.D., Juls' Psychology, Founder & Principal Business Psychologist