Why Do We Need Forward-Looking Planning?
In many organisations workforce planning is still a reactive process. Action is taken when a position opens up, a project expands or a team falls short. Yet the workforce dynamics heading into 2026 and beyond make a reactive approach unsustainable.
Several critical trends are shaping the labour market in Türkiye at the same time:
- Demographic shift: As the baby boomer generation retires, a significant part of institutional memory leaves with them.
- Skill gaps: Digital transformation is rapidly widening the gulf between the skills employees have and the skills the work requires.
- New generation expectations: As Gen Z enters the workforce, working models, career expectations and value priorities are changing fundamentally.
- Macroeconomic uncertainty: Currency swings and inflation make pay planning and workforce cost forecasting harder.
What Workforce Planning Is — and Is Not
Workforce planning is not recruitment planning, though the two are often confused. Recruitment planning answers the question “which positions will we fill, and when?” Workforce planning takes a much wider view:
Which capabilities, how many people and which working models will we need over the next 3–5 years to reach our strategic goals? And how will we meet those needs?
“If you do not start planning today for the people you will need tomorrow, tomorrow you will face an impossible deadline.”
The 5 Steps of Proactive Planning
- Map the current state. Build a detailed inventory of your people by age, capability, career stage and criticality. Which positions are critical, and which are easy to fill?
- Align with strategic goals. Work out which new capabilities the company’s 3–5 year growth plans will require. What kinds of profiles do new markets, new technologies and new business models call for?
- Run a gap analysis. Lay out the distance between current capacity and future need, dimension by dimension. Will those gaps be closed by hiring, by reskilling, by buying from outside, or by automation?
- Build scenarios. Locking yourself into a single plan is dangerous when uncertainty is high. Prepare separate workforce plans for three economic scenarios: optimistic, base and pessimistic.
- Turn it into an action plan. Plans stay on paper unless they are tied to a calendar and to owners. Set up quarterly follow-up mechanisms and keep the plan alive.
Critical Focus Areas for 2026
Based on the work Derin Akademi carries out with organisations, we can say this: the three most critical areas for 2026 workforce planning are these:
- Mapping AI capability: Which tasks will be changed by automation, and which will be augmented by AI? Are you preparing your people for that transition?
- Succession planning for critical roles: Have you built an internal successor pool against the sudden departure of senior leaders?
- Refreshing the EVP: Does your employee value proposition speak to Gen Z and to the senior end of the millennial cohort? Where do you stand in the competition to attract and retain talent?
The answers to these questions sit at the very centre of the strategic contribution that puts HR on the board agenda.