Making Workforce Planning Work in the NT Public Sector

Hard to fill job groupsHard to fill job groups are those that have enough peoplein NT or Australia to fill the jobs but generally people donot want to do these jobs for a range of reasons – suchas, the nature of the work, the salary levels, the location,the career opportunities and so on. If you have hard tofill job groups on your mission critical job group list thenyou need to consider retention and recruitment strategiesthat address redesign, working arrangements, growingyour own workforce, attracting the underemployed andthe underutilised labour market (that is, people who havethe skill sets you are looking for but who do not wish to work full time and areseeking alternative working arrangements).Risk assessmentAgencies can determine their own risk assessment methods for workforceplanning. These can be aligned to other business risk assessment methods, assimple as high, medium or low risk, or more sophisticated such as:• minor short-term – can be managed within workplace• sustained – cannot fill critical job group and therefore will have a sustainedimpact on the capacity to deliver service (the agency will need to consideralternative service provisions).• major – service will need to close.Tips:• Do not forget your supplysource is right in frontof you – the currentemployees will tell you whypeople are attracted to youragency and why they go.• When having difficultyattracting supply, rememberto recruit for match andattitude first.The question you need to ask is: What isthe risk to this agency of not attracting orretaining the number of employees requiredfor this job group?Supply source analysisIdentifying supply source can be one of the more difficult workforce planningtasks. If your agency has aligned your job groups/job families to ANZSCOcodes (Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations),you can simply look up the code and then search the ABS data to determine36