Strategic Workforce Planning Manager

Description:

Full Job Description
Canada Life Group is the top-level European holding company for the Great-West Lifeco’s European insurance, reinsurance, and asset management companies, with business operations in the UK, Ireland, Germany, and the Isle of Man.

European Technology sits within Canada Life Group and encompasses the technology community across all European entities - Irish Life Group, Canada Life UK, Canada Life Europe as well as Central Technology Services - Europe. European Technology supports the business strategy and collaboration of technology across all European divisions. There are multiple IT units within European Technology, each of which has its own individual set of technology platforms.

European Technology is at an important stage in its evolution. There is a need to bring market leading speed, agility, cost efficiency and risk mitigation to enable the delivery of strategies across the European businesses. To respond to and meet this challenge a new strategy and enabling organisation is being created.

This role can be based in Ireland or the UK .We have embraced a hybrid working model for most of our positions, which means that you can enjoy a balanced approach of working from home for part of the week and working from the office for the remainder of the week.

Job Purpose

Reporting to the Head of People & Culture, European Technology, this role will be responsible for establishing a workforce planning strategy and implementation roadmap across European Technology. This role will be accountable for leading this key programme to deliver and implement a strategic resource plan to enable accurate IT resource alignments to business and IT strategies across Europe; with the IT resource skills, capability, and capacity in place to match the ambition of the IT and business strategies.

As a foundational requirement for this role, the incumbent will be responsible for establishing the MI and People Analytics required to inform the workforce planning strategy – leveraging the Success Factors suite and identifying enhancements required. This role will have an MI specialist reporting directly to them.

This role will also lead the identification of the current and future skills, gap analysis and talent needs associated with the business and IT strategies and establish a strategy to ensure the European Technology organisation has the right mix of talent, technologies and resourcing models to reach these goals (Build, Buy, Borrow); at the optimum cost and investment level.

To close identified skills gaps they will work closely with the Learning, Development team in European Technology and in jurisdictions to identify upskilling programmes and new sources of talent to complement the existing resourcing model. They will also be responsible for supporting IT Leaders, and work with Finance & Procurement; along with the People & Culture to implement these new sourcing models.

This role will involve significant project management and stakeholder engagement with key roles across the European and global community – including CIOs, Heads of IT and functions, HR & Talent Acquisition partners, Finance and Procurement etc.
Key Accountabilities
Lead the development of a workforce planning strategy and implementation plan at an enterprise and business unit level where it makes sense to do so, to ensure European Technology continually has the right level of resourcing with the right capabilities, at the right cost, from the right sources needed to propel the strategies of IT and the businesses across Europe
Proactively address key workforce challenges by prioritizing emerging solutions including opportunities to partner with service suppliers, identifying phases of actions, articulating next steps & owners, KPIs and critical success factors for strategic workforce planning at a European level
Lead collaboration with European Technology Leadership Team, Technology leaders, HR and Finance partners to develop and recommend methods to optimize business planning and analytics for the planning process
Identify and leverage supporting tools and resources and data/analytics needed for measurement related to the implementation strategy – including metrics and dashboards, and effectiveness measures (e.g. scorecards/tracking to contribute to the evaluation of the Strategic Workforce Planning process)
Lead the forecasting and planning process, including scenario planning, modelling, conducting environmental scan, performing critical skill and gap analysis for future requirements, and monitoring and evaluation of the workforce plan across Europe
Partner with Learning and Development teams across Europe to address skill gaps and prepare the workforce for the future needs & team with HRBPs on career pathing solutions and implementation plans for technology roles across Europe
Assist in aligning current internal Talent Resource and Acquisition teams to target talent gaps for pipeline growth across technology in Europe
Understand and translate trends and risks in the labour market demographic and workforce implications for our current employee population to senior stakeholders
Turn complex business requirements and new business efforts into executable plans to acquire workforce needed – including identification of new sourcing solutions and partnerships to resource technology teams and activities appropriately for current and future needs
Lead the full project lifecycle from concept through to implementation
Structure and manage projects or programmes of work to successful delivery mitigating any risks or issues
Partner with IT Leaders, HR, Finance and Procurement on the implementation of new sourcing strategies; including new partnerships as identified
Prepare reports on workforce characteristics for key stakeholders leveraging data analytics and internal/external workforce insights and trends.
Apply an agile methodology to achieving results, soliciting feedback from business leaders to identify, recommend, and develop enhancements to strategic workforce planning process & methodology
Lead and develop a small team of experts.
Promote a culture of innovation and related practices and use of emerging technologies across the organization, working closely with local and shared delivery groups