Strategic Workforce Planning Forum 2026

People's analytics is no longer a specialist function the CHRO can delegate and ignore. This keynote examines how CHROs can close the analytics gap, build the business case for people with analytics, and equip HR and business leaders with the insights needed to make confident workforce decisions and accelerate Strategic Workforce Planning.

Succession planning is no longer just about identifying replacements for key roles. It is about developing a strong leadership pipeline that supports business continuity, organizational growth, and long-term capability. In this session, I will share practical insights on building resilient succession pipelines by focusing on retaining critical talent, identifying future leaders, strengthening leadership capability, and embedding succession planning as an ongoing business practice. Delegates will gain practical approaches that can be adapted to their own organizations to develop future-ready leaders and create sustainable leadership continuity.

Most organisations treat workforce planning as a painful, reactive, once-a-year budgeting exercise—making their strategic plans outdated before the ink even dries. In this session, Tala Hamedi, Senior Solution Consultant flips the script on traditional models to reveal why making strategic workforce planning a continuous, "always-on" business discipline is the competitive superpower you didn't know you needed.

This session highlights the critical need for absolute intentionality in organisational design. Discover how moving away from static, periodic forecasting safeguards business continuity against sudden market shifts, aligns headcount costs directly with real-time operational demands, and builds a truly future-ready enterprise.

Many organizations recognize the need to move beyond annual headcount planning, but struggle to make workforce planning a continuous business process. This case study explores how one organization embedded workforce planning into regular business decision-making, established governance and stakeholder ownership, and developed a sustainable capability that enables faster, more informed workforce decisions in a changing business environment

As organizations face tighter budgets and oil conservation constraints, workforce planning strategies are evolving to meet changing business realities. This panel examines how these challenges are influencing Strategic Workforce Planning and where organizations across the region stand today.

Many organizations can articulate their future strategy. Far fewer have a clear view of whether their workforce is positioned to deliver it. This session explores how a fact-based approach to Organizational Capability Planning (OCP) helps leaders assess organizational readiness, identify capability gaps and critical risks, and prioritize workforce actions. Through this lens, OCP becomes the critical link between business strategy and Workforce Planning (WFP), ensuring workforce decisions are aligned to future business needs.

Skills gap analysis sits at the heart of SWP — but most organisations attempting it for the first time quickly discover that the data is messier and the scope harder to define than any framework suggested. This panel brings together practitioners at different stages of building skills intelligence to share the methodologies they are using and what a useful gap analysis output actually looks like.

A skills taxonomy is increasingly becoming the foundational infrastructure that separates organisations doing credible strategic workforce planning from those still relying on job titles and headcount. This case study provides an honest account of one organisation’s taxonomy build, including the key decisions made, challenges encountered, and how it enabled new workforce planning and business insights that were not previously possible.

The most common reason people analytics initiatives fail is not a lack of ambition or the wrong technology — it is a data foundation that was never fit for purpose. This case study presents how one organisation diagnosed its data infrastructure problem, decided what to fix first, and built the connected workforce data environment that now supports genuine planning intelligence.

There is a significant gap between what people analytics vendors promise and what most organisations in this region can realistically deliver. This panel takes an honest look at analytics readiness — what the different maturity levels actually require, how organisations know when they are genuinely ready to move to the next level, and what happens when they try to skip stages.

Strategic Workforce Planning provides valuable insights into the capabilities organizations need to achieve their future business objectives. This session explores how organizations translate those insights into strategic talent decisions by leveraging learning and reskilling, internal mobility, succession planning, leadership development, and targeted capability-building initiatives. Attendees will gain practical perspectives on aligning talent strategies with business priorities to build a resilient, future-ready workforce.

AI adoption is forcing a reckoning most organizations aren't ready for, not because the technology is hard to buy, but because almost no one has the workforce planning discipline to deploy it well. This keynote makes the case that SWP has quietly become the most critical capability for navigating an AI-enabled workforce and shows leaders what to fix now before their AI roadmap outruns their people's strategy.

AI is changing not only how work gets done, but how organizations are designed. This session examines how HR and business leaders use Organization Development (OD) models, workforce scenario planning, and AI-driven insights to redesign work, optimize organizational structures, and make more informed Strategic Workforce Planning decisions.

A practical, interactive session on how HRBPs can move beyond traditional headcount planning to shape workforce strategy around business priorities. Drawing on real-world experiences and practical frameworks, the session will explore:
Linking workforce planning to business strategy and future scenarios
Identifying critical skills and capability gaps

Moving beyond “Buy” to Build, Borrow, Buy Using scenario planning to navigate uncertainty
Turning workforce insights into strategic business decisions
The evolving role of the HRBP in building a future-ready workforce

Explore how HR leaders are moving workforce planning from reporting-focused discussions to finance-aligned conversations with CFOs, using shared cost, value, and investment language to make workforce planning a joint business priority.

Workshop Introduction AI is forcing every organisation to rethink how it plans its workforce, how work gets done, and what that means for capacity, capability, and cost. Yet, most Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP) efforts fail to move beyond a one-off, periodic exercise that leaders rarely revisit. In the AI era, old playbooks can't keep up; the cost of getting it wrong is steep—leading to severe skills shortages, multi-billion dollar project delays, and operational disruption.

Furthermore, data shows that true AI value comes from rethinking work design rather than simply reducing headcount. Organisations leading in human-AI work design are 2.5x more likely to report better financial results and 2x more likely to provide meaningful work.

This is a facilitated working session, not a lecture. Through short framing inputs and structured small-group work, participants will shift from working in disconnected silos (where HR, Finance, and the business have different versions of the truth) toward building an integrated, decision-ready SWP operating model. It’s recognised that there's no single template or operating model as whatever is built needs to be relevant at an organizational level, but we will establish the practical guardrails, skills/task taxonomies, and scenario-modelling frameworks required to move your organisation to being future ready.

What participants will take away: A clear, peer-tested view of why SWP is now business-critical in an AI-enabled workforce, and the value it creates for both the organisation and employees

A practical read on the enablers and blockers that determine whether SWP succeeds — grounded in their own and their peers' experience, not theory

Hands-on exposure to the key building blocks in an SWP operating model that reflects the AI enabled future of work - including the translation of workforce strategy into a workforce strategy, the need for a skills/task taxonomy, deriving a view of roles/skills demand and skills supply and a framework for deciding how to close skills gaps (build, buy, borrow, or automate),

A first-draft, peer-built view of how an SWP operating model might look in their own organisation — including what needs to be in place and who should own it

A realistic starting point for launching or resetting SWP back at their organisation