Workforce profile

In a digital environment, the workforce is a key enabler. Having a workforce that is digital ready with the skills and capability to support a digital service environment is key to the agency’s success delivery of service transformation.

Analysing the internal and external labour force will allow an agency to identify the current composition, characteristics and supply of current labour and skills and in which jobs are available or in demand.

Agencies may have their own workforce planning methodologies. This guideline is not a detailed workforce profiling methodology and should be considered within the broader context of agency specific and Queensland Government workforce planning policies and methodologies.

Audience

A practitioner in the context of this guideline can include one or more of the following roles:

• Digital and ICT strategic planners
• Agency and service strategic planners
• Workforce planners
• Business analysts.

Analysing the agency's internal labour supply involves the identification of the characteristics, composition, competencies and workload of the current and future available workforce.

The analysis of the internal workforce needs to consider the agency's reliance on the current contingent workforce, including consultants, contractors, agency staff, and temporary or casual employees.

There are a number of methods for profiling and analysing the internal labour workforce including:

• Competency assessments – the Skills Framework for the Information Age (SFIA) and the Queensland Government ICT Skills Assessment Methodology can help identify critical skills gaps. This provides a consistent method of determining skills and future areas of focus.
• Analysis of critical roles – critical roles are the roles currently crucial to the achievement of agency outcomes now or in the future. A vacancy in a critical role will have a significant, tangible impact on the ability of the agency to deliver outputs, achieve milestones, or meet budget or legislative requirements.
• Workload data and analysis obtained by documenting current workloads and capacity.
• Workforce data and analysis using personnel records and reports from human resource systems.

What to consider when analysing an internal workforce

• What current skills are essential or critical to the business?
• What is the current workload?
• What does the current or future labour market look like in terms of the availability of certain occupations or skill sets and the supply of people necessary to fill them?
• What are the competencies, attributes and composition of the current workforce?
• What roles currently exist in your business unit?
• Of those roles which:
  • conduct the core business of the unit or organisation?
  • may become part of the core business under future work plans?
  • have had a high number of vacancies over the last 12 months?
  • have been difficult to fill?
  • require a long training period in order to develop the skills for the role?
  • business units have the largest number of employees?
• Consider the roles and their descriptions, not the people in those roles.
• What are current and projected retirements, turnover, secondments etc.?
• How much do you know about them:
  • where do your best performers in these roles come from?
  • where do your best performers in these roles move to?
• What is the value of tenure or stability in these roles?
• What is the demand for and availability of these skills in the external labour market?

Analysing the external labour workforce enables an agency to understand the potential future and current labour supply issues and conditions, and to build these into workforce planning strategies. Monitoring external labour market changes ensures:

• sufficient numbers of replacement staff are available to cover separation and growth
• the contingent workforce the organisation relies on is maintained at adequate levels
• intelligence is gathered to contribute to the decision of whether the organisation ‘builds, borrows or buys’ specific skills and the number of roles required.

What to consider when analysing an external workforce

• What skills does the agency currently obtain using contracts or casual employment?
• What percentage of employees are on contracts?
• What are the key skills of employees on contracts?
• What is the labour market like, including the availability of qualified candidates, ability to recruit these candidates, and organisational challenges (i.e., internal constraints) to recruiting competitively?
• What are the current external benchmarking trends such as rates of pay, or skill availability?
• What are the trends in external environmental data, such as the impact of inflation, competition, and unemployment rates?
• What is your employment value proposition?

The external environment should be scanned to identify any factors and trends that may impact on the direction of the agency’s strategic workforce planning. The aim is to develop an understanding of the key drivers that may affect the future supply and demand for labour for the agency.