Strategic workforce planning

By Cyrus Asgarian, Viktoriya Bondarets, Frederick Van Gysegem and Nina Feuersinger

Build exceptional teams that meet tomorrow’s skill requirements

Related expertise

Deepening imbalances between workforce supply and demand, amplified by major business and technology shifts, are transforming skill requirements across industries. Major economies such as those of China, Japan and parts of Europe must offset a steep decline in their working-age populations, while organizations simultaneously contend with escalating cyber threats, climate-driven disruptions, rapid job redesign, regulatory change and accelerating technological innovation. Each of these factors can dramatically reshape how work is performed.

As industries evolve, entirely new roles and skill sets are emerging, making proactive, AI-driven workforce management essential. Changes will be felt across all sectors and professions. The half-life of skills, for instance, is shrinking from four or five years to just 12 to 18 months, while 60% of today’s students will enter jobs that do not yet exist. At the same time, rapid job hybridization is creating demand for new skill combinations.

Addressing labor shortages and skill shifts requires a fresh approach to workforce and talent management that goes beyond traditional human resources (HR) reporting and short-term staffing decisions. To navigate these changes effectively, we believe that organizations must focus on five key fields of action: upskilling, staffing, streamlining, hiring and performance.

Strategic workforce planning (SWP) ties all these elements together, enabling organizations to translate strategy into long-term workforce decisions and adapt to the rapid changes taking place in the world of work. Workforce planning provides a structured way to understand, plan and manage an organization’s workforce over time. At its core, it brings together data on roles, skills, capacities and headcount with insights on recruitment, retention and productivity to support informed people decisions. Strategic workforce planning (SWP) builds on this foundation by explicitly linking workforce decisions to business objectives and long-term strategy. It enables organizations to anticipate future workforce demand, identify gaps early and define targeted measures to close them – ensuring the workforce evolves in line with changing business needs.

Matching workforce supply and demand

Nina Feuersinger

Partner

Munich Office, Central Europe

SWP is essential for understanding current workforce supply and anticipating future demand, enabling precise and informed decisions. It ensures the right person is in the right role at the right time and in the right capacity, thereby optimizing workforce efficiency and headcount allocation.

SWP delivers a number of additional benefits. It establishes a unified language for effective communication and decision-making across business and HR. It enhances transparency over employees’ roles and skill sets. It identifies tasks that can be automated to improve efficiency. And it helps define future workforce demands based on business and people strategies while creating a clear roadmap for action across recruitment, retention and workforce transformation.

Roland Berger’s proven approach to strategic workforce planning

Our SWP solution follows a three-step approach: analyze workforce supply, determine workforce demand, and then use this information to identify the gap and derive actions to close it. This approach integrates qualitative insights with advanced analytics to support robust decision-making.

We have also created an AI-driven SWP engine that enables users to produce precise outputs for SWP, strengthen workforce reporting and generate actionable recommendations for immediate implementation across business and HR functions.

Advancing the workforce

Businesses benefit from this approach in four key areas:

Anticipating future roles and skills demand: By establishing a sustainable, pragmatic workforce planning mechanism, organizations can identify future jobs, assess the external talent market and adjust skill sets accordingly. We help you develop workforce scenarios based on differing projections, identify gaps in the workforce and draw up appropriate action plans aligned with your business objectives
Benchmarking workforce capabilities: We provide you with access to the world’s largest and smartest labor market database, allowing you to choose from more than 5,000 market profiles and a global list of companies as a basis for comparing workforce capabilities
Assessing external and internal talent mobility: We help you understand the availability of external talent and internal employee mobility, as a basis for filling vacancies or skill gaps. This supports effective recruitment and retention
Upskilling your workforce to meet future needs: We help you develop upskilling programs to close the gap between the current and optimal workforces, establishing career paths and learning measures to support sustainable, long-term workforce development

Success stories

Strategic workforce planning for a chemical company

Situation: The client turned to us for support implementing a new vision for one of its largest chemical production sites, employing approximately 1,000 people. A strategic workforce planning handbook was needed to ensure the organization built the resources, headcount and competencies needed to achieve its vision.

Solution: To address this challenge, we conducted a series of key stakeholder interviews and workshops to gather insights and align expectations. We then reviewed the proposed vision and complemented it with an outside-in perspective through high-level benchmarking against industry standards. Additionally, we analyzed employee data to understand the current workforce structure and capabilities. Based on these insights, we modeled the organization’s future workforce requirements and developed a comprehensive SWP handbook to guide implementation and future rollouts.

Impact: Optimization opportunities related to the new vision were identified, enabling more efficient resource allocation. Quantitative and qualitative workforce gaps were defined, and targeted measures introduced to close them. The resulting handbook supports ongoing workforce planning, reporting and decision-making.

Enhancing workforce efficiency at a multinational energy company

Situation: A major European energy provider, with annual revenues between EUR 30 and 50 billion, had recently undergone significant organizational changes. Shaping these changes were numerous market developments, including an accelerated shift to renewables, stricter emissions regulations and the war in Ukraine. Automation and AI had not received enough attention at a corporate level, but the company believed they could be used to seriously improve workforce efficiency.

Solution: The CIO launched a project to gain an initial overview of the potential improvements that automation could enable. This project aimed to develop a standardized job architecture to support the analysis, identify action areas to improve workforce management, and create a comprehensive new automation program supported by improved workforce analytics.

Impact: The energy provider significantly improved precision in its workforce decisions, thereby enhancing productivity and steering of technology investments. An overall automation potential of 15% was identified across the organization, affecting all verticals and organizational building blocks.

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