I Built Workforce Plans at Three Companies. Here's What Actually Mattered.
Last month, a consultant asked me what methodology works best for strategic workforce planning.
I didn't have a good answer.
I've built workforce plans at three companies: a manufacturer, a utility, and a pharmaceutical company. Three different industries. Three different scales. Three different workforce challenges.
One succeeded spectacularly. One delivered modest results. One failed quietly.
The weird thing? They all used similar methodologies. Same frameworks. Same technologies. Same consultants involved in parts of it.
The methodology wasn't the differentiator. Something else was.
After years of trying to figure out what actually mattered, I think I know: leadership alignment and iteration speed.
That's it. Not the sophistication of your model. Not the comprehensiveness of your data. Not the elegance of your framework.
Can leadership actually align on priorities? And can you execute fast enough to learn before momentum dies?
Everything else is noise.
Company 1: The Manufacturer (Spectacular Success)
Mid-size industrial manufacturer. 2,400 employees. Aging workforce. Clear automation trajectory.
The challenge: 40 percent of production floor roles would be significantly impacted by automation over 3-5 years. No succession plans for 15 critical technical roles. High attrition in skilled trades.
What we built:
- Skills gap analysis across production and maintenance
- Automation risk assessment with 1, 3, and 5-year horizons
- Redeployment pathways from production to maintenance roles
- Cross-training programs for multi-skilling
- Technical apprenticeship program
Pretty standard stuff. Nothing revolutionary.
The outcome: 18 months later, they had redeployed 45 production workers to maintenance tech roles. Created technical apprenticeship that brought 20 young people into skilled trades. Retention improved 23 percent. When automation arrived, nobody was surprised and everyone had a path forward.
Why it worked:
Not because our methodology was brilliant. Because of two things:
First: The CEO and COO were completely aligned.
Both agreed the enemy was automation displacement without planning. Both committed publicly. When conflicts arose—and they always do—alignment held.
Example: Six months in, Operations wanted to pause the program because production was behind schedule.
The COO said: Production being behind is a symptom of the problem we are trying to solve. We are short on skilled people because we haven't been developing them. Pausing makes it worse.
That conversation killed the pause request. Program continued.
Without that alignment, Operations would have won. The program would have paused temporarily. It never would have restarted.
Second: We moved fast and learned constantly.
We didn't spend six months building the perfect system. We picked five critical roles. We ran a 30-day pilot. We learned what worked and what didn't. We adjusted. We expanded.
Every 90 days, we reviewed: What's working? What's not? What do we change?
This created momentum. Small wins built confidence. Confidence built political capital. Political capital funded expansion.
By month 18, the program was running itself.
The lessons that matter most from building strategic workforce plans at three companies: alignment and speed beat methodology.