The strategy is signed off. Can your workforce actually deliver it?
An ambition for growth can be stated in one number of extra jobs. A workforce plan begins when that number is taken apart.
The UK’s Life Sciences Jobs Plan is a useful current example. It estimates demand for 66,000 additional jobs in priority occupations between 2025 and 2035, alongside the need to replace a further 52,000 existing workers.
The important part is not simply the size of the headline. The plan goes further: 28 of the sector’s 31 priority occupations overlap with at least one other priority sector; 83% of projected additional employment requires qualifications at Level 4 or above; and the proposed response covers coordination, skills, hiring and good jobs.
In other words, it begins to reveal the assumptions beneath the ambition: occupations, qualification level, competing demand, supply routes, place, partnership and ownership.
These are government estimates and commitments, not realised outcomes. They should not be treated as precise promises. Their value is that they make the workforce problem visible enough to test.
Strategy does not translate itself
Inside organisations, the people implications of strategy often arrive late. The investment case has been approved. Technology choices are under way. Milestones are in the calendar. The CPO is then asked to explain the workforce required to make it all happen - sometimes with considerably more confidence than the available evidence deserves.
The discussion can collapse too quickly into today’s organisation chart, future roles and a vacancy forecast. Those outputs matter, but they sit downstream of a more important chain:
THE STRATEGY-TO-CAPABILITY CHAIN
Strategic outcome → organisational capability → changed work → roles, skills, teams and technology → timing and demand hypotheses → internal and external supply → ownership and decisions.
If any link is assumed rather than discussed, a polished workforce plan can conceal a weak strategy-to-capability connection. Across different executive discussions, I have seen leaders agree enthusiastically on the strategic priority while holding quite different versions of what delivery requires. One assumes the capability already exists. Another expects it to be recruited. A third sees it as a technology dependency. Nobody is quite sure who owns it, which planning horizon matters or which forum can change the decision.
That is not an HR data problem. It is an enterprise planning and alignment problem.
Five questions to test before starting detailed workforce planning
The first test does not need to become an industry of its own. Take one strategic priority and ask five questions:
1. Capability
What must the organisation be able to do that it cannot do reliably today? Define an organisational ability linked to an outcome, rather than jumping straight to a job title or generic list of skills.
2. Changed work
What work is genuinely new, materially different, continuing with a different skill or mindset, or likely to decline? This is where strategy, operating model and technology choices become tangible.
3. Timing
Where and when must the capability be available? What lead time, qualification requirement or time to competence sits behind it? A capability needed in three months creates a different choice from one needed in three years.
4. Supply
What credible internal and external supply exists? Which people could be developed or redeployed, which adjacent talent pools are relevant, and where will other organisations be competing for the same capability?
5. Ownership
Who owns the capability, the evidence and the decision route? What should happen when a milestone slips, supply changes or an assumption proves wrong?
Together, these questions create a demand hypothesis - a view to test and refine - rather than a number dressed up as certainty.
Evidence should narrow uncertainty, not hide it
The wider Skills England annual skills report 2026 reinforces the scale of the issue. It projects priority occupations to grow by about 24% by 2035, or 1.8 million additional jobs, compared with roughly 14% growth for non-priority occupations. It also concludes that the education pipeline alone will be insufficient in some areas and that significant reskilling of the existing workforce will be essential.
Skills England is explicit about the limitation: these future estimates show broad trends, not precise forecasts; this is a good planning discipline. Long-range numbers should expose assumptions, ranges and choices - not create false comfort.
For an organisation, the same principle applies. A credible plan records which assumptions are strong, which remain weak, who owns them and what signal should trigger a review.
An enterprise decision, not an HR hand-off
The CPO has a central role in making this visible, but cannot own the answer alone. Strategy defines the outcomes. Operations understands the work. Finance tests affordability. Technology shapes redesign. Business leaders own delivery. HR connects the evidence, choices and workforce implications.
This is the purpose of Strategy-to-Capability Planning within Cello’s Workforce Capability Diagnostic: not to reward planning activity, but to test whether a strategic priority can be translated into future capability, changed work, credible supply and owned decisions. In our DESIGN methodology, the D stands for Diagnose. This establishes the problem, assumptions and evidence. E stands for Envision, where we align leaders on the future capability, horizon and outcome before the detailed Shape of the design begins.
The result is not certainty. It is a better quality of decision, made early enough to preserve meaningful choices.
Author: Chris Woodward. Chris is the founder of Cello Consulting, a boutique workforce transformation advisory firm that supports CPOs and wider Execs to maximise the strategic value of HR and underpin organisational effectiveness.