We recently had the opportunity to spend some time with a group of strategic workforce planners who have moved past forecasting and headcounts to true strategic workforce planning.  Each person had a different story and journey - because each had different organizational circumstances, different skills and experiences, and different personal qualities.  However, there are certainly themes and similarities in these areas between the different people.

Unfortunately, each person had been forced to work out for themselves how to make the journey, because there was no reference book to call on.  It's a story that is familiar to all too many strategic workforce planners, and it got us to thinking - forget all this research on what organizations are doing, we need to find out how individual practitioners can be more successful!  What a valuable resource that research would be for workforce planners.

So we are developing that resource!  Aruspex is sponsoring a strategic workforce planner research effort to find out what skills, tasks and qualities are the most helpful for people performing strategic workforce planning. Some of the areas the research focuses on are:

  • The activities that successful strategic planners place the most emphasis on
  • The location and importance of the function inside the organization
  • Which activities are done with the business, and which for the business
  • The most useful skills and experience to have
  • The most valuable personal qualities to develop/focus on

We're asking the entire strategic workforce planning community to contribute to this research, and of course the many subscribers to our blog are a key part of that community!  We need responses from people with all levels of skill and confidence in strategic workforce planning, so please take the survey now!