Strategic workforce planning: A practical guide for UK businesses

Strategic workforce planning is all about considering the talents and skills your organisation will need in the future and ensuring you have a plan in place to meet those needs. Historically, many businesses took a more reactive approach, filling vacancies only as they came up, but certain changes have made that less viable.

First, skills shortages pose an ongoing challenge for many UK businesses. Manpower’s 2026 UK Talent Shortage report puts the challenge in sharp focus, with 73% of UK employers saying they’re struggling to find the talent they need. While that number has decreased slightly from the 76% reported in 2025, it remains significantly higher than it was a decade ago, after ten consecutive years of rising skills shortages.

Secondly, legislative changes are impacting how much it costs to fill vacancies. The Employment Rights Act (ERA), enacted in late 2025, includes several significant changes to employment laws. Research from CIPD indicates that 74% of UK employers believe the ERA will increase their employment expenses. In addition, 72% believe that a rise in the National Living Wage will increase the cost of employing new staff.

Pressures like these are increasing the need for strategic workforce planning, so we’ve developed this guide to help you get started. It explains what steps are involved, what causes breakdowns in the process, and how the right software can make a big difference.

Key takeaways

• UK businesses are struggling to find the talent they need and facing increasing costs to hire that talent, making a reactive strategy less viable than in the past

• Three main steps are involved in strategic workforce planning: Understanding what talent your business currently has, identifying what you’ll need in the future, and creating a plan to fill any gaps you’ve identified

• Inconsistent, unclear, or fragmented data is the most common driver of ineffective strategic workforce planning

• Your demand forecasting needs to take AI into account and consider whether automation can replace or supplement specific roles

• Bringing all of your workforce-related data into a single, unified platform is a logical starting point, as it helps you avoid many strategic workforce planning problems 

Strategic workforce planning: The three-step framework

Put simply, strategic workforce planning is a process that helps you determine where your business is heading in the medium to long term and how you need to hire or train people to get there.

It could be that you have 80% of the skills you need already, but some people aren’t sitting in the right seats. Or, you may need an entirely new department in 12 months, and that department will need to be staffed.

Either way, strategic workforce planning can move your business from being reactive to proactive, and that ensures your organisation remains efficient and productive. To stay proactive, you need to follow a three-step process and repeat it.. Let’s take a closer look at those steps.

1. Workforce assessment: Identify the skills you actually have

To get an accurate view of your current resources, you’ll need to go beyond simple job titles or job descriptions and develop a skills inventory. It’s a detailed catalogue of each employee’s capabilities that may include:

• What they currently do

• Where they excel

• What their previous experience is

• Whether they have specific certifications

• What their future aspirations are

That initial step gives you a snapshot of what you have right now. However, given the future-looking nature of strategic workforce planning, you’ll also need to factor in whether any of your current employees are likely to leave. 

It’s also important to consider what might happen in the next 12 to 24 months, as this can affect how your current situation will evolve. The questions you might ask include:

• Is anyone nearing retirement? 

• Do any teams have an unusually high turnover?

• Will a senior manager be leaving, and do you have an internal succession plan for that role? 

• Will your structure change, and where will your current staff sit in that structure? 

• What are your business-critical roles, and are they all filled? 

2. Demand forecasting: Translate business goals into talent needs

Once you know what you have, you can start figuring out what you'll need. The demand forecasting step is where you translate your organisation's 1–3-year business plan into specific talent requirements. So, if you're planning to launch a new product line, open a new regional office, or start using a new technology solution, you’ll want to identify how it will change the skills you need and when you’ll need those skills. Some changes may even mean you’ll no longer need some skills. 

Also, as legislative changes in the UK are likely to increase the cost of hiring staff, you’ll need to consider how much you anticipate those positions will cost and what budget will be available. 

This is where the strategic workforce planning process can seem a bit overwhelming, especially if your HR team relies on several disconnected tools. Our State of the Back Office Report illustrates how common that approach is, with 82% of HR teams saying they use a minimum of four tools each month and 58% reporting that they’re held back by technology.

A fragmented system impacts more than daily operations; it can also make demand forecasting more difficult. But this is precisely where the right HR software can help by providing a consolidated and connected source of data. 

When assessing your future requirements, you should also consider what role AI-based systems will play. Many businesses treat this as a separate conversation, but it’s an integral part of strategic workforce planning.

To make this easier, you can use a technique known as task decomposition, where you break down each role to understand the specific skill sets it will require. Task decomposition not only allows you to gauge which positions your current employees could perform, but also what could be performed by AI.

For example, if 50% of the tasks in a role require human judgment and problem-solving, but the remaining 50% could be automated, then you may need to consider merging that role with another one. Once the two roles have been combined, you may discover that the job description will change significantly.

By now, you’ve likely noticed that this process involves pulling information from many different spheres. The next step involves putting it all together and deciding how to act.

3. The build vs. buy decision

Step one involved identifying what you currently have, and step two covered what you're likely to need in the future. Any shortfalls you’ve identified form part of your gap analysis, which allows you to plan exactly how to fill those gaps.

The first option is to focus on what you have now and build on the existing skills of current employees through additional training. This can help your business fill as many gaps as possible. If you choose to automate some tasks, you could potentially combine some of your current roles, and training can help ease that transition. 

Keep in mind that additional training could take as long as 12–18 months, so you’ll need to factor that time into your plan.

Where you’ve identified specialist skills that your team doesn’t currently have, or you’ve discovered a gap that needs to be filled in a short timeframe, your other option is to bring in external talent (which we refer to as ‘buying’).

Of course, hiring externally comes with its own set of challenges, which we covered in our UK Hiring Trends for 2026 overview. It’s worth mentioning that an increasing number of companies aren’t limiting themselves to the domestic market. Specialist employers of record can help you find and employ experts from all around the world.

Ultimately, you’ll most likely find that a combination of ‘building’ and ‘buying’ is the most suitable approach, and that’s not unusual. Once you’ve correctly identified what you’ll need and developed a plan to address those needs, you’ll be well positioned moving forward. Revisiting that plan regularly and making appropriate adjustments will also keep your organisation on track.

To ensure that your efforts are successful, let’s look at the common reasons that resourcing strategies fail and how you can avoid those pitfalls.

Why strategic workforce planning fails for so many organisations

As we’ve explored the steps involved in strategic workforce planning, we’ve touched on employee skills, employee training, recruitment, financials, and IT functions. For many businesses, a separate tool or platform handles each of those functions, and different departments manage those tools.

Source: Rippling

As we mentioned earlier, our research shows that many HR teams use multiple tools. In fact, more than half of them use at least seven different tools each month. The numbers are even higher for finance and IT teams. To further illustrate the point, we created the following table, highlighting the functions and typical tools of each department:

The Fragmented Data of HR, Finance, and Line Managers

The data fragmentation that results from this setup is one of the primary reasons many strategic workforce planning efforts fail. The problem is not only that your people managers need to find information from multiple sources, but also that different departments may have a completely different understanding of what’s required.

Let’s imagine that your HR team, which is leading the project, believes that the business will require a specific number of new positions in the next two years, and it has a specific budget to achieve that outcome. Finance, on the other hand, has adjusted the available budget based on the new Employment Rights Act, and the individual department managers have agreed on an entirely separate plan for future restructuring.

The disparate perspectives will get you nowhere fast. In fact, trying to establish a strategic plan in such a disconnected environment is akin to herding cats.

How unified data helps strategic workforce planning

The previous sections all share a common theme: Strategic workforce planning relies on data from many parts of the business. If all that data exists on a single, unified platform, everyone involved in the process will be working from the same playbook, and you’ll be in a much better position to focus on the plan itself.

It’s worth noting that many systems claim to be ‘unified’, but the term is often misused. When looking for a truly unified HR platform, you should check that it consolidates HR, payroll, IT, and finance in a single database, with no third-party tools required. All these features are built into Rippling on a single platform.

How it works in practice

Succession planning is a good example of how a unified platform can help with strategic workforce planning. For most businesses, workforce planning is based on a conversation someone had 12 months ago. The more organised HR teams might even be using a spreadsheet, but finance and department managers are probably unaware of that document.

When you’re working from a unified platform that everyone can see, your plan goes from being a vague concept to a clear map that informs your decision-making. HR can see who's retiring or being promoted and which staff members (if any) are being developed to fill those roles. Your finance team can see how this will impact payroll and advise if it foresees any problems. And your department heads will always know what comes next.

How to know if your workforce plan is working

Having well-organised and reliable data is a critical part of strategic workforce planning, but as we mentioned, it’s an iterative process that you should regularly revisit and update. The following metrics can help you gauge whether your plan is actually delivering the desired outcomes:

Are you closing the gaps you identified?

Your strategic workforce plan identifies the gaps that currently exist or will exist in the future, so you need to monitor whether you’re on track to fill them (either internally or externally). If you’re falling behind the timeline you anticipated, you may need to reassess your approach.

This is another case where having a unified platform can be very beneficial, as data relating to your current workforce, business planning, and recruitment all live in the same place and update automatically.

How many business-critical roles are you filling from within?

If business-critical positions have become vacant due to retirement or promotion, it’s worth analysing whether those roles were filled internally or externally. In many cases, filling internally is preferred, as you’re taking advantage of the corporate knowledge that already exists within your organisation.

If the majority of roles are being filled externally, you may need to review how your organisation is handling staff development. This is where a learning management system can be useful, and it’s another capability you should look for in any unified HR platform.

Is your workforce plan meeting the expected budget?

Senior management will almost always ask about the financial side of things, so it’s important to understand whether there’s any divergence and, if so, what is causing it. It could be that you’ve had to pay new hires more than you expected or that you’ve filled some positions several months before you planned.

Regardless of the reason, you need access to accurate information to answer any questions that might come your way. That’s yet another benefit of a unified platform. It helps you collate that information much more efficiently than having to pull data from several disconnected sources, and it ensures you’re using the most up-to-date information. Rippling’s own analytics capabilities are extremely powerful in this respect.

Understanding more about Rippling’s unified workforce management system

Source: Rippling

Our State of HR report for 2025 revealed that 88% of HR managers spend more than a quarter of their day on repetitive admin tasks. Almost 23% said they would prefer to use that time on strategic workforce planning.

Rippling's workforce management platform was designed not only to improve the efficiency of HR teams but also to make workforce planning much more straightforward. It does so by addressing the key challenge highlighted in this article: fragmented data.

Case Study: High Speed Training

After High Speed Training became employee-owned and doubled its headcount, the HR team knew it was time to reassess its HR system. Rather than making work easier for them, it was eating up a lot of their time with manual processes, and it didn’t meet their needs in multiple areas. 

“We had a lot of difficulty getting the information we needed out of the system,” Beth Jones, the company’s HR Operations Specialist, says. “It required a lot of manual input and spreadsheets. We couldn’t even store certain data, let alone report on it.”

Rippling came on board to help the team meet critical goals:

• Improve and streamline reporting

• Consolidate fragmented tools into an all-in-one solution

• Provide much greater levels of customer support

• Provide scalability as the business continues to grow

The implementation has transformed the way the team works. High Speed Training has not only seen an order-of-magnitude improvement in efficiency and productivity, but they’re also exploring how our platform can help with more strategic planning.

“I put forward a proposal to shorten Fridays during the summer, and we’re using Rippling to evaluate the impact, looking at absence trends and engagement scores to see if it’s making a difference,” Jones says. “The reporting in Rippling means I can take real, tangible data back to leadership to support our decisions.”

Getting started with strategic workforce planning

Without effective information management, strategic workforce planning isn’t impossible, but it’s a lot more difficult and time-consuming.

The most sensible approach is to focus on getting the data right first. When that happens, many of our customers, just like High Speed Training, say that strategic decision-making is almost a natural progression. 

Of course, seeing is better than believing. Request a demo, and the Rippling UK team will walk you through everything.

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