THE AUSTRALIAN Public Service (APS) has been slow to implement strategic workforce planning and will face a critical skills shortage in the next five to ten years, a report has found
THE AUSTRALIAN Public Service (APS) has been slow to implement strategic workforce planning and will face a critical skills shortage in the next five to ten years, a report has found.
Only 41 per cent of the 86 APS agencies surveyed had policies, strategies or frameworks in place to ensure they had the skills and capabilities needed for the next one to five years, according to the report, with skill shortages in the areas of accountancy, and to a lesser extent, legal, economics, project management and information technology.
The problem is compounded by the finding that 23 per cent of the APS workforce will be eligible to retire by 2010, the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO) report found.
This figure is expected to swell as those aged 40-44 and 45-49 years, who represent more than 16 per cent of the APS workforce, will be eligible to retire within a ten-year period.
For HR professionals in the APS the report’s recommendations include a different approach from most HR practice. “For one, it’s focused on aggregates, rather than individual employees,” said Tess Walton, co-founder of workforce planning consultancy Aruspex.
“It also introduces some new concepts and skills – like supply and demand, risk assessment, environment scanning, forecasting, futuring and scenario planning –to the HR capability mix.
“These are exactly the kinds of contributions that will allow HR to earn their place at the executive table and contribute to the business planning process. A strategic workforce plan is the people component of the organisational strategic plan.”
This is simply a new skill alongside the work HR is already doing, Walton said. However, the fact that the ANAO felt compelled to audit workforce planning in the first place is an indication of how tough the workforce environment is.
“Skills shortages, workforce ageing, competition from the private sector – there is a lot happening that will have an enormous impact on tomorrow’s workforce, to the point that HR departments who don’t address this workforce change will struggle to remain relevant,” she said.
HR professionals can address these issues by projecting a “no change future state”– a popular method which shows how the workforce will look if turnover and recruitment continue to happen just as they have been recently – often exposing some glaring holes.
Organisations need to be more aware of what is going on both inside and outside their businesses and how that may affect their workforce, Walton said.
“Get a good understanding of what the ageing workforce really means to you, where the national skills shortages are, how your internal trends are tracking and how they impact on the agency’s ability to deliver their strategic priorities, what policy changes will affect your workforce needs, and what your competitors are doing.
Walton said this understanding of competitors did not extend to a commercial sense, but rather companies who might be competing for your employees: “the private sector, other agencies, consulting and self employment are all competitors for public sector employees”.
