Stage 1 - Starting Point

Page updated: 02/12/2025

Stage 1 – What is your starting point?

The first element of your workforce plan is establishing your starting point. This stage is about recognising the external pressures on the labour market, the future of work, your current priorities, and internal talent breakdown of your division or department.

Why is this important?

Understanding your starting point is important because it helps you take stock of external and internal factors that impact your division and department.

What can you do?

Here are some suggested tools that can use to help you understand your starting position.

A PESTLE analysis

A PESTLE analysis can help you identify your external pressures. It is one of the most effective frameworks for recognising the ‘big picture’ context in which your division and department operates. Looking ahead should be a priority to understand the drivers that could influence the direction of your division and department.

It looks at six key factors – political, economic, sociological, technological, legal, and environmental. Monitoring and assessing each of these external factors and the impact they may have enables you to formulate business thinking and planning. See the CIPD factsheet on how to conduct a PESTLE analysis

A SWOT analysis

Carrying out a simple SWOT analysis alongside a PESTLE analysis will help you identify internal elements for this stage – areas of strengths and where there might be opportunities or threats to your division and department.

External factors like those considered in a PESTLE analysis will interplay with internal factors that can impact divisional and corporate strategies. Conducting these analyses will support you in identifying critical roles, among others, in your division and department. Knowing critical roles will help you prioritise your further actions. You will find more information on critical roles on this page.

Engage and involve your teams in these exercises as it provides helpful insight into the challenges and more importantly potential solutions.

Data and Information Gathering:

  • Where does data sit?
  • What is the quality/reliability?
  • How often does it change?
  • What are the gaps?

Where are your data sources?

Information that will help you understand your baseline include:

Once you better understand your division and your workforce, you can then analyse your workforce data so that you can focus on roles that matter the most and that will make the greatest impact to your divisional and departmental performance.

Analysing your data

You may analyse your workforce data into:

  • Demographics, e.g., age, gender, etc
  • Structures, hierarchy levels, job roles, competencies, contract types, etc. 

This will help you gain a better understanding of your current workforce so you can then identify any gaps or issues.

Advice, guidance and support on your extent and depth of your data analysis is available from your departmental Business Support Team and your People Management HR (Human Resources) Business Partner.

The workforce planning critical role analysis spreadsheet has been developed using age and gender as key demographics. You can choose to add other workforce data sets as appropriate to the level and scale of analysis you wish to undertake.

Take each step at a time following the guidance.

Downloads

Critical Role Analysis Template.xlsx

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