Step 4: Understanding workforce availability

This step involves analysing the existing workforce in the area under consideration, including its skills, deployment and any current problem areas. It also includes looking at the potential future workforce in the relevant labour market.

In this step you should focus on critical areas where there is a high risk of problems with workforce supply in the future. Without being too precise, try to identify the most important areas where there could be significant potential problems.

How does the current workforce compare with projected future needs?

• How does your current workforce compare to the future workforce that will help you achieve your strategic ambitions? Consideration include, structure, jobs, roles, employment status, skills, attitudes, diversity, costs, current performance measures, performance issues, outcomes achieved and so on.
• What critical current workforce issues also need to be addressed? These may include current occupational and skills shortage areas, areas of high turnover, areas where many people with critical skills are due to retire soon, areas where the workforce profile does not fully reflect the diversity of the local community.

Understanding workforce data

To provide the basis for analysing current and potential future workforce issues, human resources (HR) should collect workforce data including personal and job-related details, and vacancy levels.

Personal details of employees

These include:

• gender
• age
• ethnicity
• disability.

Job-related details

These include:

• full time or part time, full-time equivalent (FTE) 
• nature of contract – permanent, fixed-term, temporary, casual, and so on
• nature of relationship with organisation – directly employed, employed through a service provider, and so on
• working pattern – hours per week, days, shifts
• basic pay
• grade
• length of service in the organisation
• service area – for example, adult social care, finance
• service type – care for the elderly, youth justice, and so on
• job role – for example, nurse, accountant, and so on 
• geographical location.

Vacancy levels

This includes:

• how these are distributed in terms of service area, service type and job role
• the extent to which they are ‘real’ vacancies – for example, are active attempts being made to fill them
• how they are being covered
• whether they are recognised shortage ‘hotspots’.

To enable sharing and analysis, the data collected should meet the local government workforce data standards which are currently being developed. For a copy of the draft standards and for more information please visit:

Workforce data standards – on the Local Government Association (LGA) website

Alternatively, contact the LGA Analysis and Research team:

telephone: 020 7664 3000

So far so good

However good the workforce data, it cannot fully capture the reality of the workplace. The HR workforce planning lead therefore needs to work closely with managers to fully understand:

• how the workforce is grouped: for example, can all staff in a department be represented in one of four categories – administrative support, operational support, operational, and managerial? Or, are more categories needed?
• how the work is divided and delivered: are teams arranged by activity or geographically? Is some work done by teams created specifically for the purpose and, if so, how far can these types of teams adapt to fulfil the future service needs?

Understanding the ‘workforce system’ – for techniques to understand and predict future workforce numbers in particular occupational areas

Identifying your current skill gaps

Understanding your labour market

A council will meet its future workforce needs through external or internal candidates. For external recruitment, HR leads can use ‘labour market analysis’ to understand how easy or difficult it will be to fill a particular vacancy. For internal recruitment succession planning will help to identify how existing members of staff might be developed into new roles.

For each of your critical workforce groups:

• identify possible future workforce problems
• establish whether any of the problems require you to revise your business plans or assumptions about who will do the work
• work out alternatives and or skill development opportunities to ensure the internal workforce supply can fill any gaps
• record your concerns for inclusion in your workforce strategy.