Navigating workforce disruption: The case for strategic workforce planning

On 10 December 2025, the Board Leadership Center welcomed Jan Van Acoleyen, Human Capital Lead at Proximus, Anthony Van de Ven, Partner at KPMG in Belgium, and Bernd Carette, Director at KPMG in Belgium, for a discussion on Strategic Workforce Planning (SWP). KPMG has worked together with Proximus to build and implement their SWP program since 2023. During this event, the speakers explored what SWP is, why it’s increasingly relevant for organizations today, and Proximus’s journey in building their program.

Today, organizations operate in an environment defined by rising complexity and accelerated change. At the same time, the talent market is undergoing its own transformation. Digitalization, AI, and automation are redefining the skills organizations need, while demographic shifts, such as aging populations and persistent labor shortages, are reducing the available talent pool.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025, 22% of today’s jobs will change in nature by 2030, including the creation of new jobs equivalent to 14% of today’s workforce, offset by the displacement of 8% of current jobs^[1]. At the same time, those jobs that are expected to remain will also see a fundamental shift in skill requirements.

To remain competitive, organizations must adopt a proactive, forward-looking people strategy that aligns future needs with a sustainable and economically sound talent approach. Strategic Workforce Planning bridges the gap between strategy and execution and ensures that workforce decisions are intentional, future-focused, and financially aligned. It helps organizations assess: what jobs are likely to be created? Which will likely disappear and what solutions are there for those employees? How will the skill requirements for the remaining roles evolve, and how can we ensure employees stay relevant and employable? Strategic Workforce Planning balances and aligns the organization’s workforce with its long-term business goals by providing organizations with a five-year view on resource and capability needs, supporting effective succession planning. It strengthens strategic oversight by ensuring the organization is aligned and positioned to move in the desired direction, and helps orchestrate the financial roadmap to organizational sustainability. It reduces financial, operational, legal, and reputational risks through proactive workforce planning – if we know where the new and displaced jobs will be, we can start to act today. Finally, it prepares the organization for future challenges by anticipating shifts in talent, skills, and demand, for example due to new technology, budget constraints, an aging workforce, or other workforce or market challenges, and identifies gaps between talent supply and demand.

As part of Proximus’s strategy – Bold 2025^[2]  – they are “building a connected world, that people trust, so society blooms.” This includes developing digital solutions, connecting people and devices worldwide, ensuring cybersecurity for their customers, investing in upskilling, and more, through leveraging their strengths – fostering an engaging culture and empowering ways of working, rolling out the #1 gigabit network for Belgium, and engineering technology assets to enable digital ecosystems.

At the same time, they’re facing challenges from the market: customer expectations are shifting (demanding more, quicker, and cheaper), changes in technology are shifting revenue models, and new players are coming to the market with innovative solutions. Strategic Workforce Planning has played an important role in addressing these challenges while delivering on their strategy. It enables them to better invest in the right people where they’re needed, address the differing expectations of talent in new domains, and prepare their existing workforce with the new skills they’ll need for the future.

Proximus’ vision for delivering value to their stakeholders is to not only grow profitably and globally through strong brands, and to delight customers with unrivalled experience, but to act for an inclusive society and be sustainable in everything they do. Their proactive approach to talent management prepares the organization for the future, while also enabling the reskilling, upskilling, and (internal) mobility of their people so that they can remain relevant, with the right skills, in the right roles.

Strategic Workforce Planning needs a full view of the workforce – both internal and external – as well as a cross-organizational perspective, considering all capabilities, regardless of business unit.

This is not only an HR exercise though. Proximus recognizes the importance of business leaders and management in this process and set up a governance and operational structure that included a Strategic Workforce Planning Steerco with business leaders, a Reskilling Operational Committee, and the Management Team.

To identify future skills needs, the HR team works closely with business leaders to determine which activities will, for example, be new, grow, stop, be simplified, or automated.

To assess future talent supply, they considered the impact due to natural outflow (pensions), hiring predictability and needs across teams, higher inflation and the resulting higher labor costs, the use of contractors and consultants, the talent landscape and ongoing war for talent, the opportunities for (steered) internal mobility and for (voluntary but free) upskilling, and reskilling across the workforce.

There’s no one-size-fits-all solution to bridge the gap between the two. Rather, solutions are aligned to the different needs across teams and business units. Different solutions are also required across different countries. The Belgian approach cannot necessarily be extrapolated to other countries where a company operates. Each local labor market has its own challenges and cultures to be considered.

Board engagement is also important, both in terms of the value it brings to boards as well as enabling decision-making.

Strategic Workforce Planning helps the board to understand the talent challenges in a data-driven way. It reveals where the organization will face shortages or surpluses, which skills and roles are critical for the future, and where the organization is at risk. It links headcount and skills to budget and productivity, quantifying the impact of talent actions on financial outcomes. It also shows how different strategic choices or external trends affect workforce needs.

This, in turn, enables the board to make informed and timely decisions on containing costs versus avoiding shortages, aligning strategic initiatives with talent capacity, and shaping long-term talent strategy in alignment with societal impacts and commitments. It transforms workforce discussions from reactive and tactical to proactive and strategic, demonstrating the value of human capital as a long-term investment rather than a short-term cost.

Furthermore, with the increasing pressure on boards to not only deliver financial results but to consider impacts on employees and society, Strategic Workforce Planning makes employability a strategic priority through:

• Continuous upskilling & reskilling: It identifies future skill requirements and plans training programs to meet them.
• Internal mobility versus external hiring and firing: It provides a detailed map of talent in the organization, making it easier to redeploy staff from declining areas of the business to growing ones.
• Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG): It provides the data and plans to back commitments on training, internal mobility, and limiting redundancies, for example.

Overall, Strategic Workforce Planning not only prepares an organization for the future, but it can bring both economic and societal benefits. 

KPMG’s Board Leadership Center (BLC) offers non-executive and executive board members – and those working closely with them – a place within a community of board-level peers. Through an array of insights, perspectives, and events – including topical seminars and more technical Board Academy sessions – the BLC promotes continuous education around the critical issues driving board agendas.