Do You Have the People You Need—or Just the Positions Filled?

For decades, workforce planning has often started with positions. How many employees does the organization need? Which roles are vacant? Where do we need to hire? Those questions still matter, but they become less useful when the work inside those positions is changing faster than the organizational chart.

That is increasingly the challenge facing HR and workforce leaders. AI is changing how tasks are performed, technology is creating new capabilities and eliminating others, and organizations are asking employees to work differently across functions. At the same time, skills gaps and competition for talent are making it harder to assume that the capabilities a company needs can simply be hired when the need arises. A company can have every position filled and still discover that its workforce is not prepared for where the business is going.

The more important workforce-planning question, then, is not simply how many people do we need? It is what does our organization need to be capable of doing next, and are we developing a workforce that can do it?

Workforce Planning Has to Look Further Ahead

McKinsey’s HR Monitor research, which included approximately 1,300 HR professionals and 5,500 employees across ten countries, found that only 11% of organizations take a long-term strategic approach to workforce planning. Much of the activity still centers on shorter-term operational needs even as organizations recognize that technology, shifting skill requirements, and changing business priorities are reshaping work.

That creates a timing problem for HR. If workforce planning begins only when a position becomes vacant or a new capability becomes immediately necessary, the organization is already reacting. Recruiting may solve some of those needs, but specialized skills can be expensive, difficult to find, or in demand across multiple industries at the same time.

Strategic workforce planning starts earlier. Leaders have to understand where the business is going, determine what people will need to know and be able to do when it gets there, assess which capabilities already exist inside the organization, and then decide what should be built, hired, redeployed, automated, or sourced differently.

That shifts HR from filling today’s vacancies toward helping build tomorrow’s organization.

A Full Organizational Chart Can Still Hide a Skills Gap

Headcount is easy to see. Capability is harder.

An organization may have a fully staffed finance team, sales department, customer-service operation, HR function, or leadership structure, but job titles reveal relatively little about whether those teams have the capabilities the business will need several years from now. Two employees with identical titles may have dramatically different technological fluency, judgment, leadership ability, adaptability, communication skills, or readiness for greater responsibility.

AI is making that distinction particularly visible. Deloitte’s 2026 State of AI in the Enterprise research found that worker access to AI increased 50% during 2025, while the AI skills gap has become the biggest barrier surveyed leaders identify when trying to integrate AI into existing workflows. Organizations are responding with education and reskilling efforts, but Deloitte also found that relatively few are assessing how the future supply and demand for skills will change.

Related Deloitte research found that 84% of organizations had not redesigned jobs or workflows around AI. That suggests the challenge is larger than teaching employees how to use a new technology. Organizations also have to determine how work itself should change, which tasks technology should handle, where human judgment becomes more important, and what employees will need to be capable of doing in the redesigned workflow.

AI happens to make the issue urgent, but the principle is broader. Whenever the Playbook changes, the Roster has to be capable of changing with it.

Training Isn’t the Same as Building Capability

Organizations clearly understand that employee development matters. U.S. companies spent an estimated $102.8 billion on training in 2024–2025, according to training-industry data compiled by Devlin Peck, while enrollment in generative-AI courses increased sharply as employers and employees tried to keep pace with new technology.

But training activity alone does not tell leaders whether the workforce is becoming better prepared for the future. A company can offer dozens of courses, create an impressive learning portal, and still fail to develop the capabilities most closely connected to its strategy.

McKinsey’s research illustrates another part of the problem. Twenty-four percent of employees reported participating in no training at all, while more than half said they receive feedback only annually or not at all. When the skills required for work are changing continuously, development cannot be separated from the everyday experience of managing and leading people.

A more strategic approach begins with the business rather than the training catalog. Where is the organization trying to go? What will employees need to be able to do to get it there? Where are the current capability gaps? Once those questions are answered, training, coaching, hiring, internal mobility, and other workforce investments can be directed toward an actual Target.

The Roster Should Be Built Around the Target

Walter Bond’s Make Progress framework connects the Target, Playbook, and Roster because organizations cannot treat those elements as independent decisions. If the Target changes, the Playbook may need to change. When the Playbook changes, leaders have to make sure the Roster can execute it.

That is particularly relevant to HR because workforce strategy can easily become disconnected from business strategy. Recruiting teams focus on open requisitions, learning teams build development programs, managers conduct performance reviews, and leaders make strategic decisions about where the organization is headed. Each activity may be valuable on its own, but progress becomes much more likely when they are connected.

If a company plans to introduce new technology, enter a new market, change its service model, expand globally, or redesign the customer experience, the workforce implications should be considered while that strategy is being developed, not after it has been announced. HR can then help leaders determine which capabilities the strategy requires and whether the existing Roster is ready to execute it.

That is a much more strategic role than simply supplying people after the plan has already been made.

Not Every Capability Gap Requires a New Hire

When organizations identify a missing skill, recruiting is an obvious solution. Sometimes it is also the right one. New employees can bring expertise, perspectives, and capabilities that would take years to develop internally.

But treating every capability gap as a hiring problem can cause leaders to overlook the potential already on the Roster. Existing employees understand the company’s customers, culture, systems, relationships, and history. With the right development, some may be capable of moving into roles or performing work that looks very different from what they were originally hired to do.

Walter teaches leaders to coach people based not only on who they are today, but on who they can become. That mindset matters in a workforce environment where organizations cannot know every job they will need several years from now. Leaders may not be able to predict every future position, but they can build employees who are more adaptable, curious, capable of learning, comfortable with technology, and prepared to take on greater responsibility.

This is where managers become an essential part of workforce strategy. HR can identify capabilities, build development programs, and provide tools, but employees develop through the work they do every day. Managers who give meaningful feedback, stretch people with new assignments, coach through mistakes, and create opportunities to practice new skills help turn workforce planning from a document into actual workforce capability.

Skills-Based Thinking Changes the Question

The movement toward skills-based organizations reflects this broader change in workforce strategy. Instead of assuming that a job title tells an organization everything it needs to know about an employee, skills-based approaches look more closely at the capabilities people possess and how those capabilities might be deployed as business needs change.

That can give organizations more options. An employee whose current position is changing because of automation may possess valuable skills that can transfer elsewhere. Someone who would never appear in a traditional succession plan based on job title may have the capabilities to grow into a future leadership role. A business may discover that an emerging capability gap can be addressed through development and internal mobility rather than competing for scarce external talent.

This doesn’t mean job titles, roles, or organizational structures disappear. It means leaders develop a clearer picture of the people behind those structures and become more deliberate about connecting their potential to the organization’s future needs.

For HR leaders, that can change workforce planning from an exercise in counting seats into an ongoing process of understanding and building organizational capability.

Build the Workforce Before the Business Needs It

The hardest time to develop a critical capability is after the organization urgently needs it. By then, leaders are recruiting under pressure, employees are learning while trying to execute, and the business may already be feeling the consequences of the gap.

The organizations best prepared for change will be the ones that connect workforce planning to strategy early. They will look beyond today’s vacancies and ask what the next version of the business will require. They will identify which skills are becoming more valuable, which are becoming less central, where employees can grow, and where outside talent truly needs to be added.

That requires HR, business leaders, and managers to share responsibility for the Roster. HR can provide the architecture for workforce planning and development, but leaders throughout the organization have to understand that building capability is part of executing the strategy.

Having enough employees to operate today is important. Making progress requires building a Roster capable of taking the organization where it wants to go next.