The business community is vulnerable in the current war for talent. It needs to develop accurate workforce data to retain and recruit the required workforce.

In South Australia the issue has a level of urgency above other states as the demographic is skewed to older workers.

Organisations need to implement quality and proven workforce planning methods to ensure they are making decisions on accurate, and not anecdotal, workforce data.

The value and importance of skilled workforce planning is increasingly being recognised and as a result it is rapidly emerging globally as a specialist discipline.

Workforce planing is a process which enables evidence-based decision making about workforce supply and demand.

It assists in aligning the needs of a business with those of its workforce, seeking a balance between both.

It can be used to expand, reduce or better utilise a workforce and for restructures, mergers and acquisitions.

It requires specific strategic and operational skills and knowledge.

With "crunch time" gaining momentum - that is, when the number of people exiting the labour market is greater than the number entering - employers are strongly advised to have workforce planning intitiatives in place by 2009 as the initial impact will be felt as early as 2010 in many industries.

A Handbool on Workforce Planning - Are You Ready For Crunch Time? - can be viewed at www.workforceplanning.com.au from April.

COMPANIES which ignore recruitment and staff development strategies do so at their peril.

The warning chorus is getting louder as jobs growth, low unemployment and baby-boomer retirements exacerbate skills and worker shortages.

"Workforce planning is like global warming," says Adelaide workforce planning specialist Julie Sloan.

"Everyone knows it needs strategic and operational management, but few are taking responsibility for it."

In the past year, skilled vacancies have jumped by 12 per cent in South Australia - with growth evident in a wide spread of industries.

SA and the Northern Territory (up 17 per cent) led the skilled vacancies ratings in the year to December in surveys by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations.

The DEWR skilled vacancies index rose almost 9 per cent in Queensland in 2007 - but finished down 14.6 per cent in Western Australia, 12 per cent in New South Wales and 1.7 per cent in Victoria.

SA also featured strongly in the latest employment figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics, with 6100 new jobs and unemployment easing to 4.8 per cent in November.

Ms Sloan says thorough, evidence-based workforce planning is not common.

"The business community is not ready for crunch time - when there will be more exits from the workplace than incoming," she says. "They need to have workforce planning processes in place by 2009."

Employers worried about the ageing of their staff are turning to workforce planners for help, reports Wendy Taylor.

EMPLOYERS and industry bodies are anxious that mass retirement of their older workers will coincide with a dwindling supply of younger workers. The result is the growth of a specialist area of human resources with a long history of being seen as a luxury: workforce planning.

Australia has only a handful of HR or management consultants who call themselves workforce planners, and Julie Sloan, director of JSM Workforce Planning, is one of them.

Ms Sloan has carried out workforce planning assignments for more than 50 companies throughout Australia, and has accumulated data on more than 100,000 public, private and not-for-profit workers in the process. This year she has managed three planning projects in the aged care, dental, and transport, storage and logistics sectors.

Growing interest in her approach has led to her addressing social policy and development staff at the United Nations in New York; a businesswomen's forum in Toronto; and Public Sector HR Conventions in Melbourne, Hobart and next month in Sydney.

Ms Sloan is "thrilled that workforce planning is now firmly on the agenda" after working in isolation for the past 10 years.

Her challenge lies not in finding work but in convincing organisations to move beyond the traditional marketing-with-glossy-brochures approach to solving staffing problems.

"My view is that there is too much focus on recruitment to address the issues and that there needs to be more focus on retention," she says. Most solutions to labour shortages "are totally reactive," she says. They usually focus on pay and are based on managers' personal perceptions of the problems rather than on hard data.

Collecting data on staff through workforce profiling is critical, she says. "My view has been that the workers have got the answers but no one ever asks them."

Through workforce profiling it often emerges that employers' worst fears will not be realised, particularly in relation to older workers.

Although there is widespread fear that everyone will take early retirement, Ms Sloan's data suggests many such workers can be enticed to stay. "The reality is that most people that I interview say: 'I'm really happy to stick around, but I want to leave this particular job. So if you offered me something that was attractive for me to stay, of course I would hang around."

Ms Sloan recently worked with an aged-care provider which feared there was a skills crisis around the corner because it lacked "the numbers, skills and knowledge" to meet demand for its services, particularly among the growing numbers of elderly indigenous people and migrants.

However, workforce profiling revealed such fears were exaggerated. The managers believed that because they had few indigenous or migrant staff they would be unable to provide specialised services.

"But you just need staff who are sensitive or understanding of their issues or have a willingness to learn," says Ms Sloan.

"And when I asked workers, 'Do you have an interest in working with this population?' we had a huge number saying, 'Yes, I'd love to'. I think we had 130 people."

Workforce profiling also revealed that 30 per cent of staff wanted to work more hours.

When examining workforce planning matters affecting young people Ms Sloan often challenges employers to consider how the jobs and training are structured, then ask young staff to help with the redesign of such jobs.

"You focus on what people like about their jobs and what keeps them there rather than only why they leave," she says.

Peter Howes, chief executive of HRM Consulting, the largest provider of workforce planning services in Australia, has been running workshops for HR staff for 25 years.

Mr Howes believes it will be the "incredibly severe competition for entry-level people, school-leavers, trainees, graduates and apprentices" that will fuel the demand for workforce planning expertise, rather than concerns around the ageing workforce.

Like Ms Sloan, he has seen his company's workforce planning division flourish in recent years. "Workshops participants have increased by 50 per cent in the past three years, but the consulting services even more so. We used to do one or two major consulting assignments every year and now we do six or seven," he says.

Mr Howes considers workforce planning an increasingly important part of HR. "It's going to become even more so because it's going to become more visible.

"Doing poor workforce planning in the past affected productivity, but people didn't visibly see it because they always had a body to fill a job. But as you get towards physically not having bodies to carry out the jobs, the need for workforce planning become self-evident."

Julie Sloan is presenting at the Public Sector HR Convention NSW in Sydney on Friday, September 23. For details visit halledit.com.au. For information on workforce planning workshops for HR professionals visit www.infohrm.com.au.