e are two types of workforce planning: hard and soft. CIPD (2018) Hard workforce planning is based on quantitative analysis, predicting how many employees, with what skills, are expected to be needed. Soft workforce planning ‘is more explicitly focused on creating and shaping the culture of the organisation so that there is a clear integration between corporate goals and employee values, beliefs and behaviors’ (Marchington and Wilkinson, 1996). It’s about finding a strategy within which information can be considered. The CIPD note the main stages of workforce planning to be: understanding the organisation and the operating environment, analysis of the workforce, determining future workforce needs, identifying gaps in the workforce, developing an action plan, and monitoring and evaluating action plans and solutions. Workforce planning aligns the strategic and business planning process with hiring and retention planning. When workforce planning is properly implemented, it can have many benefits. It can help identify issues early to avoid disruptions and costs. It can also help to identify roles and shortage of talent in the organisation, in order to fill the roles. An example of this is when an organisation is looking to expand their workforce and they can identify what sort of employees they need in order to make the expansion properly. Another advantage of workforce planning is that it can help an organisation retain employees. For example, if there is high turnover in a certain department, workforce planning can help an organisation find the cause of that certain turnover and put strategies in place to prevent it and retain employees. Furthermore, another advantage of workforce planning is that it can help avoid delays or disruptions that can have a negative effect on business profits.

Nonetheless, there are disadvantages of workforce planning. For example, the future is uncertain and there are many external factors that can have an affect on the employment opportunities, such as technological, political and cultural factors. Therefore, organisations cannot rely on workface planning. A further disadvantage of workforce planning is that it is time-consuming: organisations need to acquire all sorts of information and personal requirements of the workforce and then find suitable solutions. The