Three accounts of the same week agree that workforce planning has climbed to the top of HR’s list. They differ on how wide the skills shortfall behind it runs, and on whether the fix is a hire, a redesign of the work or a better feed of data. On 2 November TalentNeuron shipped a product that answers one narrow part of that problem: checking a plan against live headcount and cost once it has been approved.
What the CIPD survey found
The CIPD’s HR pulse report 2026, published on 27 October and supported by Talking Talent, is based on a YouGov survey of more than 800 UK people professionals. Improving organisational performance is a priority for 91% of respondents. Workforce planning to build future talent pipelines is a priority for 78%.
The capability figures sit well below those priorities. Only 14% of respondents say they specialise in workforce planning, 13% in talent management and 12% in organisational development and design. In medium and large organisations, 61% say their team identifies the skills it will need over the next one to two years. The same share, 61%, say their function has clear success measures.
Neil Carberry, chief executive of the CIPD, put the first step this way: “The first step is an honest assessment of current skills, so people teams can prioritise training, set clear measures of success, and make the business case for investment.”
The CIPD also says it will set out how it plans to help the profession build forward-planning skills at its annual conference in Manchester on 4 and 5 November.
How three outlets framed it
Onrec: a capability gap employers must fund
Onrec’s account, published the same day as the report, ran the story as a call on employers to pay for HR capability. Its headline says the CIPD urges employers to close the HR capability gap, and its key figures panel leads with the 91%, 78% and 14% numbers. Onrec also carried a longer passage from Carberry: “People teams need the backing of their organisations to deliver.”
One detail differs from the CIPD’s own release. Onrec reports the 61% skills-identification figure as a share of all respondents. The CIPD release limits that figure to medium and large organisations. A reader who takes the Onrec version would apply the number to small employers that the CIPD did not report it for.
HR Grapevine: planning on top, expertise behind
HR Grapevine came to the study on 2 November, six days after release, and framed it around ranking. Its headline puts workforce planning at the top of HR’s agenda with specialist expertise lagging behind, and its summary points to gaps in preparation for future skills needs. Where Onrec put the employer’s budget at the centre, HR Grapevine put the HR team’s own skills mix there.
HRD America: the gap is in how the work is designed
The third account does not cite the CIPD at all, which makes it a useful check on whether the theme is one survey or a wider pattern. In a 31 October piece, HRD America argued that workforce design is the gap most organisations are missing as they deploy AI. It cited The Conference Board’s CHRO Confidence Index for the third quarter, which it reported as showing that only 4% of US CHROs say their organisations are very prepared to manage AI-driven workforce change over the next two years.
HRD’s evidence comes from how the work is organised. It quotes Lee-Ann Reid, vice president of operations and director of HR at Vistek, a Canadian retailer of about 160 employees, on the process maps she built for every workflow before asking where automation could help. It also quotes Fiona Ho, CHRO at Sophos, on rolling out AI with IT: “This is not a technology rollout. We think about this as a workforce transformation and all of these different areas come together and we’re rolling this out to the whole company collectively.”
Where the accounts agree and where they split
All three agree on the ranking. Planning for future workforce needs is near the top of what HR leaders say they must do, and few teams have the specialist skills to do it well. None of the three disputes the CIPD’s numbers or the Conference Board figure HRD cites.
They split on the cause, and so on the remedy. Onrec’s framing makes it a funding problem: employers have to invest in their people function. HR Grapevine’s makes it a skills problem inside HR. HRD’s makes it a design problem across the business, where AI tools arrive before anyone has mapped the work they change. Each remedy points at a different budget owner: the CFO, the CHRO’s own development plan, or a joint HR and IT programme.
In our reading, the CIPD’s own data supports all three, because the figures describe a sequence. A team that cannot name the skills it needs in two years (39% of medium and large organisations, by the CIPD’s count) cannot design work around them, and a team without success measures (39% of all respondents) will struggle to make the funding case Onrec describes. The 14% with workforce-planning specialists are the ones who can do the first step.
Where the software fits
The TalentNeuron release of 2 November addresses the measurement end of that sequence. Its new Monitoring capability tracks an approved workforce plan against live people and cost data. At launch it reports on two measures: FTE, comparing actual headcount with planned demand, and cost, comparing actual with planned workforce cost. Customers upload monitoring data through the flow they already use for master data and see results in a summary and an analytics page.
The company says customers can see whether gaps are closing through redeployment or new hiring, and spot where headcount or cost is drifting from plan before the next formal review. It also put its labour market data on Snowflake Marketplace, so customers on Snowflake can query job posting, skills, competitor and location data with SQL alongside their own HR and finance data.
“Monitoring helps planners see how their plans are progressing without the manual work of pulling numbers together,” said Matt McGuire, SVP of product at TalentNeuron. We carried the full announcement as a press release.
The release does not claim to fix the skills shortfall the CIPD found. A plan still has to be written and approved by someone before Monitoring has anything to track. What the product changes is how often the plan is checked: continuously, against actuals, instead of at a quarterly or annual review.
What it means for the HR leader
Earlier coverage here found HR teams analysing AI’s workforce impact without replanning around it, and vendors such as SAP tying HR agents to work redesign. This week’s coverage adds numbers to that picture. Four practical steps follow from it.
- Check which 61% you are. If you run HR in a medium or large organisation, ask whether your team can list the skills it will need in 24 months. The CIPD found 39% of peers cannot.
- Write the success measures before buying the tool. Plan-versus-actual tracking only helps if the plan carries measures someone has agreed to. FTE and cost are where TalentNeuron starts; most boards will also want time to fill and internal moves.
- Decide who owns the gap. The three accounts point at three budgets. Name one owner for workforce planning capability, and say whether the money comes from HR development, a finance-led planning budget or a joint programme with IT.
- Map the work where AI is landing first. HRD’s examples started with process maps. Pick the two or three workflows where AI tools are already licensed and map the tasks before the next headcount plan is approved.
The CIPD’s Manchester conference on 4 and 5 November is the next place to watch for what the institute proposes on forward-planning skills.
Source: TalentNeuron via PR Newswire
