We are really excited to be a sponsor for the Center of Energy Workforce Development for October 7 through 9 in Indianapolis.  Vemo has really been focusing on how we can be the ideal supplier of workforce planning and analytics to the Energy industry, which faces almost all of the prevalent issues that drive the need for workforce planning: high levels of retirement and retirement eligibility, risk of brain-drain, declining talent supply, long time to skill maturity for craft labor positions, and a business model that is impacted by the external and regulatory landscape.

We look forward to talking to attending organizations about how we can help, and also hear ideas about how we can focus our products and services to best service the Energy sector.

See you at CEWD!

Vemo is at booth 540, and I’m also doing a presentation on Wednesday, September 30 at 3:15pm with Marsha Johnson, SVP HR and Chief Diversity Officer of the Southern Company and Ed Newman of the Newman Group: “Finding a Vendor, The Doing Workforce Planning.”

I’m looking forward to this format, devised by Bill Kutik, because I think that’s what organizations want to see:  what were the criteria for picking a vendor and how do you filter through all the perceived needs to the actual requirements?  Then what does implementation look like in the first 6 months to 1 year.

See you at HR Tech!

One of the questions that interests me most is “how long should a workforce plan be?”  There’s a broad concept on the market that strategic workforce plans are three to five years in duration and that anything shorter is a resource plan – code for “not really a strategic workforce plan.”

But I struggle to reconcile this with what I see in organizations, which is executives losing interest unless something helps them execute, and execute now.

I have a lot of theories of course.  One theory is that workforce planning was a significant field well into the 1970s and early 80s, but then fell into some disrepair in many regions of the world.  The last few years have been as much about rediscovering the workforce planning models as inventing new models.  At the time the workforce planning discipline was initially formulated, many forces were still in play that no longer exist – the implied contract that if you are a company person, you can work for the company for your whole career; slow moving business strategies and distribution models; a slower pace of business in general.  But that’s pre-talent war, pre-internet, pre-new business models.

So maybe strategy does not have that much to do with time. Now decisions happen very quickly.  Maybe the workforce planning theory of the three to five year workforce plan is not based on any absolute, but rather the context of the times – yesterday’s times.  Of course, there’s always a time element.  The following question is still correct: what are our key investments in the future that will lead to competitive differentiation?  But it doesn’t trump the other question: what are our key investments in the now that will lead to immediate execution and build competitive advantage? That’s the question that appears to captivate today’s business leaders.

If you are responsible for workforce planning for your organization, think about the time scale at which business decisions are made, and parallel those decisions with your workforce planning effort.  And remember, no one ever got rid of a workforce planning effort that demonstrates a quick win and built immediate changes in talent management.