Skills-Anchored SWP: A Finance-Ready Way to Plan Capacity
Workforce planning often fails when it doesn’t clearly close skill gaps critical to achieving the business strategy. Build vs buy options need to be clearly costed and measured to be accepted into the Finance planning cycle. Rupert Bader shows how recent AI developments allow us to quickly anchor SWP in skills and strategic goals, inferring internal and external gaps from job data and market signals. He describes the ways he has connected existing people analytics data to models that present build vs buy choices leaders can easily understand and trust. Finally, he shares how to leverage the existing planning rhythm, pitfalls to avoid, and the few artefacts that make planning stick for both Finance and HR/People teams.
- Mini-case: infer skills for critical roles, test market supply using generative AI.
- Close gaps with build vs buy choices, showing cost and time ranges.
- Tie options to people budgets and organization shape guard-rails.
- Keep reviews simple with Finance-friendly views: variance, waterfall, and base case comparisons.
- Common pitfalls and fixes: internal conflict, missing costs, long-term vs short-term planning.
- Anchor workforce planning in skills and strategy, not just headcount and cost.
- Frame choices as build vs buy with clear ranges, risks, and status quo implications.
- Connect scenarios to budgets and organization design choices leaders already engage in.
- Use three artefacts Finance reads: budget and cost per head variance, long-range planning waterfall, and base case vs strategic imperatives.
- Avoid common traps and engage Finance and HR leaders early with trusted data in the existing business planning and review cycle.
Rupert Bader
Former Group Director, Workforce Strategy & Planning · Walmart
Why this is on the agenda
Companies face tighter budgets, slower hiring, and rising skill shortages. Workforce plans stall when they lack clear strategy & skill data, credible cost estimates, or ownership. HR and analytics leaders need a shared, finance-ready way to connect skills, capacity, and cost so decisions can be acted on quickly in the short term (monthly or quarterly) and close skill gaps in the most cost-effective way in the long term. This connected planning approach ensures companies are building capabilities internally and providing opportunities to their employees that close the most critical skill gaps for the future. It also builds on the increasingly prevalent investment in people data and analytics to learn from past successes in attracting high-performing people who stay longer. This quality-of-hire approach has enabled companies to make the case for short term investments in employees (like internship programs or truck driver licensing) that pay off in long term retention and performance.