New Year's Resolutions
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Tess
Walton - Happy New Year! It's 2006 and only four
years (according to DEWR) until Australia will have
a workforce shortage of 195,000 - and to prepare for
that we need to make some workforce planning resolutions
and stick to them. Below is a list resolutions I recommend
you select from for your organisation this year. |
Choose
at least three of these to apply in your work, repeat them three
times...and stick to them! If you can keep your resolutions,
your organisation is well ahead of the game in tackling the
upcoming workforce shortage.
- I
resolve to take achievable, pragmatic steps toward
workforce planning. Workforce Planning must
be a journey, and you should take it a step at a time,
rather than attempting to implement a fully fledged
approach on day one. Your next step might be introducing
environment scanning, creating the right people metrics,
or even building a forecast of your "no change
future state"...whatever it is, take the step,
and then you can take the next one.
- I
resolve to look outward and forward, not just inward
and backward. So many of our workforce planning
and analysis efforts focus on what has happened in
the past inside our organisation. It's becoming more
and more important to look at external factors, and
look into the future. Ensure that your workforce planning
and executive reporting includes these vital aspects.
- I resolve to learn Strategic Workforce Planning
techniques - adding skills such as scenario
planning, forecasting, and gap analysis to your current
skill set might be the most important step you can
take in preparing your organisation for the future.
Consider taking one of our popular workforce
planning workshops
- I resolve to treat the labour market as
a market, and apply marketing techniques to it.
The market for talent is becoming increasingly challenging,
and it's time we started to compete in it just as
we do in the markets for customers and capital - that
way we will be competing to win! Read
more about this in an earlier newsletter
- I resolve to be willing to forecast the
future - yes, predicting the future is an
inexact art, but many disciplines (including finance
and marketing" do so - with varying degrees of
accuracy, but almost always with value gained in the
future. Remember, all our knowledge is about the past,
but all our decisions are about the future.
- I resolve to filter data and convert it
to information and insight. While a lot of
data can be interesting, very little of it is normally
useful. Data becomes information when it is positioned
in context, and is insightful when it relates to your
organisation - and when the executive can easily understand
and interpret it to take action.
- I resolve to make Workforce Planning a priority
in my organisation. Can you imagine hearing
"it's not a priority" for business planning?
With a 195,000 worker shortage looming, failure to
workforce plan could well prevent you achieving your
business plans, and the return on investment in workforce
planning is usually compelling - make a real business
case for your executive!
- I resolve to stop letting today's issues
make me stop planning for tomorrow. Think
of Workforce Planning as the ounce of prevention you
need to prevent the pounds of cure you are spending
putting outy the fires of these burning issues - look
to the future and phase out this firefighting.
- I resolve to share my experiences with other
workforce planners - if you aren't a member
of the Strategic Workforce
Planning Network - join now!
- I resolve to say "why?" and "what
if?" at least three times a week!
Contact
us if you need help ensuring your employer can get
these resolutions in place.
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Intepreting DEWR's Jobs 2005 Report
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Another
important report from DEWR is Jobs
2005, a fairly detailed analysis of the Australian jobs
market. It's useful for job seekers, but it also has some
great data and analysis for employers, and we hope that it
will become a regular report from the government. However,
it's thirty six pages long, and it will save you a lot of
time if you know what you are looking for! |
At
the bottom of page 5 you will find the forecast jobs
growth by industry. The higher the growth in your industry,
the tougher it will probably be to compete for the best
workers. Property and Business Services, for example,
will add more than 33,000 jobs, while manufacturing
will shrink by 3,000.
Turn
the page, and you can start to drill down further, with
analysis of how highly qualified the workforce in each
industry (including industry sub-sections) is - which
might give you some insight into how changing employment
trends might affect you. You can also see how prevalent
each industry is by state - for example, while NSW has
32.4% of Australia's workers, they only have 27.3% of
Electricity, Gas and Water employees, which could well
be very interesting to NSW employers in that industry.
Page
15 lists the current skills shortages, leading into
some good insight into education and training, jobs
with "good prospects" and particular segments
of the labour market like single parents - all good
reading for workforce planners.
Then
on Page 26 the Job Prospects Matrix starts, with some
excellent information about gender breakdown, full time
vs part time, growth prospects and relative unemployment
rate for particular jobs, to a quite granular level.
There
is a lot of good planning information in Jobs 2005,
and we recommend you download
it and interpret it for your organisation - or give
us a call if you need some help. |
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Spotlight Trend |
| In
1999, 7.1% of new apprentices were over 45 years old. In
2004, this had increased to 10.8%, with more than 40,000
new apprentices over 45 - Jobs 2005 |
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Thought
for the Month |
| "Cheers
to a new year and another chance for us to get it right"
Oprah
Winfrey |
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This
month we will finalise the schedule for our popular
Strategic Workforce Planning training workshops for
2006 - drop
us a line if you have any requests for dates or
places
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In our next issue... |
Fantastic
New Tools - Next month we'll be launching some
exciting new tools to help with your workforce planning
initiatives - watch this space!
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