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Workforce Planning for Long-Term Success

Why is strategic workforce planning so important?

Employers who take time to analyze the labor market to make a plan can save money, save time, and make the most qualified decisions for talent. Strategic workforce planning is a constant process of gathering data-backed insights for evaluation, identifying talent gaps, and creating actionable plans to address those gaps. A workforce plan should be collaborative across all teams, functions, and locations of a business. And without data, these plans fail.

Workforce planning enables companies to thrive in disruption.

Start strategic workforce planning with a free sample report from Lightcast.

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What's your Workforce IQ?

Take the test:

1. Do you research workforce trends?

2. Do you operate from a foundation of skill profiles?

3. Do you consider diversity goals?

4. Do you track compensation data over time?

5. Do you think about the evolution of an employee?

With Lightcast data, answer these questions with confidence. Effectively build out career pathways, upskill or reskill your workforce, and gain job-specific knowledge for recruitment and retention.

Build a strategic workforce plan:

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Tap into the full picture of global labor market data.

Access to the world’s most detailed information about occupations, skills in demand, and career pathways provides labor market insight to employers and facilitates strategic workforce planning. Global data powers the workforce planning process, delivering the crucial information needed to plan talent strategy, train workforces, and find workers in a dynamic labor market.

Normalize your job titles into relevant terminology across the job market.

Compare roles and benchmark them against your competitors, regions, or industry. When you connect internal role data with external labor market data, you remain agile as skills change and job markets shift. Speaking a common language of skills allows you to make sense of how they fit into your current and future roles.

Monitor real-time supply and demand data.

What talent do we have now versus what will we need in the future? Where do we find qualified talent and how? Companies should perform a skill gap analysis to understand their internal workforce needs and identify areas for improvement to meet future business demands. And when you understand current workforce gaps, you can implement targeted talent acquisition approaches.

Leverage career pathway intelligence to address skills gaps.

You don’t always have to look outside your four walls to find the future talent you need. Through normalizing roles and building out skill profiles, employers gain the full picture of the skills within their organization to fuel an internal recruiting strategy. Companies who promote internal mobility retain and advance the workers they have, saving time and money in a competitive labor market.

Take the guesswork out of future plans.

Once companies know where they are and where they want to go, they can create actionable plans to get there. The right data enables talent management teams to pinpoint key market trends and challenges impacting their talent supply chain to plan accordingly for the future. A long-term talent strategy informed by workforce intelligence unlocks growth opportunities, proves ROI, and leads sustainable change.

Customer Success Story

A financial infrastructure company

identified rising skills and occupations across roles in eight global markets to define a career path in Payment Operations (PayOps). They addressed skills gaps and talent shortages, highlighted skill transferability, and built a foundation for their online certification program.

How can I use global data to guide my strategic workforce plan?

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Find the Right Solution

API

Integrate Lightcast skills data into your hiring system and strategy to find and build talent.

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Software Solutions

Use actionable skills data to inform talent acquisition strategies, build learning and development programs, and respond to skills trends.

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Workforce Consulting

Optimize your workforce planning process with custom data sets, personalized analysis, and targeted recommendations.

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Consider the workforce you have, and the workforce you’ll need in the future.

Companies should continuously evaluate their business strategy to achieve long-term goals in talent management. They can build a future-ready workforce by creating and following a workforce plan to acquire the skills they will need in the future, accounting for market trends and competitor actions along the way. This includes identifying skills that will be critical to future success and providing insight into whether those skills should be developed internally or hired for. As workforces evolve and vacancies arise in critical leadership positions, human resource teams need a process to fill roles quickly and effectively to minimize business disruption through succession planning. The right data enables the entire workforce planning process.

Solutions for Workforce Planning

Take a skills-based approach to strategic workforce planning.

Use Career Pathways to see the complete picture of your potential workforce and its skills. Look beyond industries and traditional promotions to identify skill overlaps and illuminate new sources of talent.

Track workforce trends for a responsive workforce plan.

The world of work is constantly changing, make sure to keep up with the latest workforce trends. Strategic workforce planning involves all aspects of the employee lifecycle to hire, train, and retain a great team to achieve short and long term goals.

Incorporate labor market data into every aspect of your workforce planning process.

Tap into data and analytics that encompass the global playing field to see shifts and trends in global regions far faster. You’ll benefit by understanding these shifts before they materialize.

Benchmark the skill sets of your workforce against your competitors’.

Look at internal skill profiles to see what skills you’re requiring for a role and if your competition is requiring skills you’re not, or vise versa. Based on these insights, you can set strategic objectives for acquiring what skills are most relevant for the future.

Learn more about workforce planning.

Schedule a time to talk with a member of our team. We'd love to show you how Lightcast can help you make strategic workforce planning decisions.

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