SHuRePlan

What are the likely gaps between supply and demand that will occur if we do nothing?

Mapping supply onto demand

Steps 3 and 4 will have given us a picture of how workforce demand and supply are likely to grow.  By comparing these forecasts we can get a picture of where gaps between supply and demand are likely to occur over the period of the plan.  Gaps can occur both in the overall numbers of staff available and also in the skills that they have.  More subtle gaps can arise in terms of the flexibility of the workforce i.e. numbers may be OK but it may be difficult to cover peaks and troughs of workload i.e the deployment may not be right.

It normally makes sense to start with the numbers gaps for broad categories of staff  and home in on the more detailed gaps as necessary.

The normal approach to gap analysis is to plot projected growth against projected supply to see how the gap might potentially grow as in the chart below.

How likely are the gaps?

If you have mapped more than one scenario into your demand or supply assessment it can be useful to plot these into the comparison of supply and demand to give an estimate of how likely supply and demand are to balance.

The chart above shows a typical comparison of supply and demand projections.  The 'Low Demand' and 'Optimistic Supply' lines actually show no gap.  However, testing some different assumptions shows that the gap between supply and demand could be quite large if the high demand and pessimistic supply forecasts are right. The area where the supply and demand ranges overlap only represents a small proportion of the possible range of gaps between supply and demand.  This illustrates why plotting a single supply and single demand projection could be misleading.