Workforce Planning Examples: How These 3 Companies Are Preparing For The Skill-Ready Future

Workforce planning is no longer a back-office spreadsheet exercise. For HR teams facing skills shortages, shifting market demands, and retention challenges, it’s become a board-level priority. A recent SHRM report noted that 83% of HR leaders believe their organization’s success increasingly hinges on workforce planning, yet fewer than half feel confident in their ability to do it well.

As more organizations attempt to align their business goals with the actual capabilities of their workforce, this gap gets more visible. While traditional workforce planning focuses only on roles, requisition, or headcount forecasts, strategic workforce planning gives emphasis to skills, not just seat count. And it enables HR teams to map, mobilize, and grow talent in step with the business.

If you’re looking to future-proof your workforce in a practical, measurable way, these strategic workforce planning examples offer a clear starting point.

In This Article:

What sets strategic workforce planning apart?

Strategic workforce planning addresses a common misconception: workforce planning is just limited to headcount forecasting and has zero alignment with the business goals. It actually prioritizes skills over titles, agility over static headcount, and long-term alignment over short-term fixes. It is a continuous, collaborative process — not an annual HR ritual.

There are three core capabilities that set modern workforce planning apart:

• Skills visibility and mapping: Strategic planning starts with identifying the skills people already have, where gaps exist, opening up internal mobility pathways, and making it easier to match talent to evolving needs

• Scenario planning: Modern workforce planning accounts for market shifts, new technologies, regulatory changes by building multiple “what if” models around talent demand, cost, and supply

• AI-powered mobility tools: Intelligent talent experience platforms now help surface candidates for open roles, recommend learning paths based on adjacent skills, and provide managers with real-time views of team capabilities

In short, strategic and effective workforce planning is not a fixed plan — It’s a living system that adapts to business change while keeping people development at its core.

Related: Mastering Strategic Workforce Planning: A Comprehensive Guide

3 Examples of Workforce Planning

From healthcare to technology, these examples of workforce planning strategies show what it looks like when HR moves from reactive to proactive planning.

1. Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany

Operating in over 60 countries across 64,000+ employees, Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany faced a growing need to evolve its workforce planning from a simple headcount exercise into a strategic, skills‑driven capability. Recognizing that relying on static forecasts wouldn't match fast‑changing talent needs, the company introduced a centralized skills taxonomy to create a common language across regions and departments. 

This laid the groundwork for AI-enabled scenario planning, allowing HR and business teams to assess future demand against variables like retirement rates, salary inflation, labor availability, and expansion plans.

Rather than reacting, Merck KGaA could proactively determine where critical skills would be needed, when they would be lacking, and what the financial implications might be. “When you’re able to have strategic yet concrete discussions focused on business ROI and workforce opportunities, suddenly people are listening,” said Alexis Saussinan, Global Head of People Insights & Effectiveness at Merck KGaA, Darmstadt, Germany. That clarity helped reshape conversations around talent investment.

To scale this capability, Merck KGaA integrated their skills and scenario data into SAP SuccessFactors, bringing real-time workforce insights directly into systems used by HR, finance, and business leaders. The result? Workforce decisions became faster, more precise, and tightly aligned with both strategic goals and cost efficiency.

The impact:

• More agile, data-informed talent decisions

• Improved planning precision across global regions

• Strategic alignment between people, cost, and capability needs

Read the full story:Mastering Workforce Dynamics: Merck KGaA Germany’s Cutting-Edge Approach

2. Excellus BlueCross BlueShield

Following a 37% workforce expansion over two years, Excellus BlueCross BlueShield (BCBS) needed to rethink how employees explored internal opportunities. Many team members weren’t aware of open roles, and internal mobility often required fully offboarding and rehiring individuals — a time-consuming and inconsistent process.

The result? Career visibility was low, internal transfers were rare, and high-potential employees were starting to look elsewhere.

“We were experiencing what I would consider fairly significant growth... but we didn’t have a consistent way to track or understand skills across the organization,” explained Tim Lippincott, Vice President of People Strategy at Excellus BCBS.

To build a more consistent, employee-centered experience, the Excellus team conducted a nine-month listening survey initiative involving over 2,500 employees. This survey revealed: what people needed: clearer development paths, mentorship, and visibility into roles beyond their immediate teams.

That insight shaped their new approach — a skills-first strategy powered by Phenom Talent Marketplace. Employees could build skill profiles, receive personalized role recommendations, and identify development paths based on real data. The experience also included peer mentoring, internal gig work, and shared accountability between employees and leaders.

“When we went through and started to ask our employees what mattered the most to them... the word empowerment kept coming up again and again and again,” Lippincott noted. This approach helped them avoid change fatigue, build organic momentum, and demonstrate tangible ROI at every stage. 

For HR and change management professionals, the lesson is clear: don’t push forward on arbitrary timelines. Advance only when there’s evidence of engagement and value.

The impact:

• 75% visibility into internal talent for managers and recruiters

• 27% faster internal hiring

• 30% reduction in turnover in key job families

Read the full story:How Excellus BlueCross BlueShield Solved Career Visibility with a Skills-First Approach

3. EPAM Systems

EPAM Systems, a global software engineering and professional services company with over 50,000 employees, has been executing a skills-based workforce strategy since its founding in 1993. What began as manually tracking skills in spreadsheets evolved into a deeply integrated, company-wide framework powering staffing, learning, and performance.

“It all started because as a professional services company, our whole business is matching people to work,” explained Sandra Loughlin, Chief Learning Scientist at EPAM. “We have to figure out what projects clients need, what kinds of skills they need from us. And then we have to go and find the people that have those skills.”

Unlike many companies where skills initiatives are HR-led, EPAM takes a business-first approach. Skills data is treated as a business capability — critical for agility, service quality, and operational efficiency. Their infrastructure is supported by a unified skills framework, governed data mesh architecture, and a performance model where career progression depends on validated skills, not self-reported ones.

This foundation enables EPAM to offer tailored learning paths, mentorship, and internal opportunity matching — all connected by skills data. Employees can explore any role in the company and receive a curated development journey, including communities of practice and high-quality courses.

The results speak for themselves:

• Double the retention rates compared to industry peers

• Higher quality of work, as reported directly by EPAM clients

• Stronger alignment between talent, business needs, and market shifts

Read the full story:EPAM’s 30-Year Skills Journey: Achieving Business Agility & High Retention

Strategy is no longer optional

Workforce planning still feels out of reach for many HR teams, especially when the pressure to get it right has never been higher. The solution lies in strategic planning. Planning that focuses on roles instead of skills, or short-term hiring over long-term capability, can’t keep pace with today’s rate of change. The best way to get started is actually getting started without waiting for the perfect conditions. 

Each of these examples of workforce planning  have one thing in common: started with what they had, including fragmented data, emerging business demands, and a mandate to do things differently. What unified them was a shift in mindset, seeing workforce planning as a living, skills-first strategy, not just a forecasting tool.

If you’re part of an HR team asking how to prepare your workforce for what’s next, the path forward doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Start with skills. Start with visibility. Start where the impact is real, and build from there.

Ready to explore what that could look like for your organization? See how Phenom supports skills-based workforce planning — no matter where you are in the journey.