Are We Planning our Workforce ….or Just Our Budgets?

Right now, across the sector, colleges are deep into curriculum and budget planning for the year ahead.

Difficult decisions are being made. Trade-offs are being weighed. Numbers are being scrutinised.

But here’s the question I keep coming back to:

👉 How much of that conversation is truly about the workforce – not just the budget?

A few months ago, I was in a room full of HR leaders at one of our FE HR Hub Breakfast Club sessions, exploring this exact challenge.

We started with a simple framework from the CIPD, which describes workforce planning at three levels:

• Micro — individual roles and immediate hiring needs
• Meso — team or departmental planning
• Macro — organisation-wide, long-term workforce strategy

 

What quickly became clear is this:

In large, complex organisations like colleges, most workforce planning activity sits at the meso level.

Departments plan. Adjust. Respond.

But far fewer organisations are consistently stepping back to take a macro, whole-organisation view of their future workforce. And given the environment, that’s not surprising.

Planning in a World of Short-Term Certainty

In FE, workforce planning doesn’t happen in a vacuum.

👉 It’s shaped – often heavily, by short-term funding visibility.

When funding is uncertain or confirmed late, planning horizons shrink. So organisations quite rationally focus on what they can control:

• delivering the curriculum
• balancing the budget
• filling immediate gaps

 

Workforce planning becomes something that happens within these constraints – rather than something that helps shape them. And at this time of year, that dynamic becomes even more pronounced. Because as budget discussions intensify, there’s a subtle shift:

• from “What workforce do we need for the future?”
• to “What workforce can we afford right now?”

 

Both are necessary questions. But they don’t always lead to the same decisions.

Holding the Bigger Picture

What I’m increasingly seeing – and encouraging  – is not a choice between short-term reality and long-term thinking, but a need to hold both.

👉 Workforce planning isn’t about predicting the future perfectly. It’s about improving the quality of decisions we’re making now – despite uncertainty.

Even in constrained environments, small shifts can make a big difference:

• Creating space for organisation-wide workforce conversations, not just departmental ones
• Identifying a handful of critical workforce risks over the next 12–24 months
• Linking workforce decisions more explicitly to strategic priorities, not just financial ones

 

Because without that macro lens, there’s a risk that:

• decisions become fragmented
• capability gaps build over time
• and organisations remain in a cycle of reacting rather than shaping

 

A Simple Question to Shift the Conversation

• If you’re in the middle of planning right now, one question I’ve seen unlock better conversations is:
• 👉 “What are the 3 biggest workforce risks we’re facing in the next 12–24 months?”
• It’s a small shift.
• But it moves the focus beyond structure and cost  – and onto capability, sustainability, and impact.

 

Want to Explore This Further?

I shared a more detailed walkthrough of this at our April 25 Breakfast Club session – including some practical ways to approach workforce planning without overcomplicating it.

🎥 You can watch the session here

If you’d like to receive the slide deck used in the above session, email me at info@fehrhub.org

Final Thought

There’s no getting away from the reality that funding pressures are shaping many of the decisions colleges are making right now.

And in that context, a strong focus on budgets isn’t just understandable – it’s essential.

But perhaps the opportunity, even within that constraint, is this:

👉 To make sure workforce considerations stay part of the conversation  – not separate from it.

Because the decisions being made now – about curriculum, structure, and cost, are also, inevitably, decisions about people, capability, and capacity for the future.

The challenge isn’t to choose between financial sustainability and workforce planning. It’s to keep them connected.

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