Workforce planning in the APS (Part 1) - WP a growing concern in the APS

Bloody hell  - now I know the limits of each blog post (I thought I could write a weighty tome...each time)!!!

Anyway, where was I...oh yes, so the 'scientific management' mindset that I had was such that my research topic seemed quite straightforward - I would research the impact that workforce planning had on organisational performance. This seemed quite a reasonable thing to do, after all, workforce planning was held to be the apogee of HR practice, and a lot of time was being devoted to it by the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC).

Here's what I understand about the chronology:

In this country, the interest in workforce planning in the Australian Public Service (APS) first picked up momentum in the early 2000s when the Commonwealth Management Advisory Committee’s Organisational Renewal review advocated that agencies in the Australian Public Service (APS) engage in more systematic workforce planning. The call became even more urgent following Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government Administration in 2010, which advocated workforce planning as a mechanism to facilitate an agile, capable and diverse APS (p. 57). Since this time, the Australian National Audit Office (ANAO), the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) and others have expended considerable energy in calling for and promulgating workforce planning:

• In 2003 the APSC commenced reporting on workforce planning activities in the State of the Service 2002-03 report, and gradually the amount of space dedicated to the topic has expanded such that since 2010-11 it became a chapter in its own right (note that in 2010–11 the chapter was entitled “Workforce Planning”, and since 2011-12 it has been called “Workforce Planning and Strategy”) (APSC, 2003; APSC, 2011);
• The ANAO conducted an audit into workforce planning activity in 2005, which found that 28 per cent of participating agencies had an established workforce planning process in place (ANAO, 2005);
• The Ahead of the Game: Blueprint for the Reform of Australian Government Administration (2010) report recommended that the APSC create a Human Capital Planning Framework and establish a Workforce Planning Framework;
• The APSC created the Australian Public Service (APS) Job Family Model to better understand occupations in the APS in 2011;
• Since 2011 successive agency “Capability Reviews” have recommended the adoption of workforce planning;
• From 2010-2012 the APSC worked in partnership with 70 agencies, to deliver an APS-wide workforce planning framework. Workforce planning was positioned as a business-focused planning process that agencies could use to re-shape their workforce and manage workforce-related risks (APSC, 2012, p. 119).
•  The APSC launched a two-day “Workforce Planning” training program for HR managers in 2012, which was subsequently joined by “An Introduction to Workforce Planning” course in 2014.