512 Workforce Planning

Unit Overview

512 Workforce Planning is a critical unit within the CMI Levels 5 module. Leaders must understand the role of planning within the workplace. Workforce planning involves ensuring that the organisation is able to recruit and assign employees roles. Since organisations are required to effectively handle the different roles and responsibilities within the workplace, workforce planning is essential in providing the leaders with the relevant approaches related to the ability of the leaders to achieve the desired goals and objectives within the workplace through approaches such as duty allocation and accomplishment of tasks and responsibilities within the workplace.

The leaders must understand the approaches of recruiting within the workplace as well as approaches that they can use to build the desired goals and objectives in relation to meeting the needs of the workplace by ensuring that the roles and responsibilities in the workplace are effectively addressed. 512 Workforce planning is a unit that aims at supporting the need of the leaders to understand the approaches to planning for their workforce.

It provides the learners with the understanding of principles that they can implement in ensuring that they understand the trends within the market and the needs of the organisation, which are critical lain, building the capabilities towards meeting the organisational human resource needs. the unit also helps to improve the ability of the learners to collect relevant information within the workplace, which involves being able to effectively improve performance in relation to retaining and replacing leaving employees within the workplace, which is an important requirement of the leaders, especially in top and middle levels of management within the workplace. The unit is taught in 16 hours of guided learning and contributes 4 credit values towards the completion of the CMI Level 5 module.

Suitability of the Unit

512 Workforce planning is a unit that is significantly suitable for the leaders within the workplace. Leaders are required to ensure that they understand the needs of their areas of responsibility. This involves understanding the needs of their teams and ensuring that they can effectively acquire the right talents and workforce to meet these needs. The leaders should also understand the principles of collecting information from the market level to ensure that they are able to support their decision-making and implementation of various strategies within the workplace. This involves understanding the patterns of human resource planning and recruitment approaches within their areas of responsibility. The leaders must understand the principles that they can use to achieve these duties and ensure that there is sustainability within the workplace.

The unit is designed to meet the learning needs of the middle managers within the workplace. These leaders are responsible for a larger scope of the organisation, which includes departments, units, lines or regions within the workplace. However, it is also applicable to other stakeholders. The senior managers can understand the principles that are used in planning in their areas of personality. External consultants, especially in the field of human resource management, can use the unit to build the understanding and knowledge that can be used towards providing suitable information within their areas of operation.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of the unit, the learners should be able to:

• Identify and analyse the rationale for workforce planning within the organisations

• identify t e h challenges that could be associated with workforce planning and the approaches that can be used to overcome the challenges identified

• Identify theoretical models that support the process of workforce planning

• Identify the critical forms of data and information that can be used to identify the human resource needs within the workplace and the trends within the market that could impact the process of workforce planning

• Understand the impact of organisational objectives on flexible employment practices, especially within their areas of responsibility

• Develop an effective workforce plan that is aligned with the needs in their areas of responsibility and focuses on meeting organisational goals and objectives

Key Learning Areas

The unit is designed to impact the ability of the leaders pursuing the unit to effectively develop workforce plans based on the needs of the organisations. Some of the main areas of learning include:

The Concept of Workforce Planning

This area of learning helps the learners to identify the approaches that they can use to identify the need for workforce planning within their organisations. Learners are guided to understand the reasons why organisations need to conduct workforce planning. The area also helps them to identify the challenges that they could face when developing the plans and approaches that they could use to overcome these challenges hence ensuring that the organisations are provided with relevant and adequate employees to achieve the desired goals and objectives.

Process of Workforce Planning

This area of learning focuses on understanding the principles of workforce planning and the actual process of setting the plan. The learners are guided to understand theories such as the demand-supply model, business case model, and the skills gap model, which are used in supporting workforce planning. They are also introduced to methods of collecting relevant data, including the process of benchmarking, which provides data for the process of planning.

Learners are introduced to hard and soft data that they can use within the workforce setting. Additionally, they are guided to understand data from both external and organisational sources to ensure that they contribute towards establishing the specific plan aligned to the organisation. The learners are lastly guided to the process and principles of creating an effective workforce plan to me the needs of the organisation.

Evaluation

Upon completion of this unit, the learners are put through the evaluation process. This process involves completing a written assessment that tests the practical and theoretical information acquired in the learning process.