I was sitting in a planning meeting at a major public university last month when the provost asked a deceptively simple question: "How many people do we need to hire next year?" The CHRO started to answer with a headcount figure. Then she paused. "Actually," she said, "I have no idea what skills we'll need, which positions will be remote or hybrid, or whether we're replacing people who left or adding capacity." That pause — that moment of recognition — is exactly what I'm seeing across higher education and public sector organizations right now. Your strategy isn't broken. It's just operating in a world that no longer exists.
The pandemic accelerated change so rapidly that most organizations took a reactive posture: policies for remote work, vaccine mandates, return-to-office negotiations. Those decisions made sense in real time. But I'm now fifteen months into a new role as a consultant, and I'm watching leadership teams mistake tactical responses for strategic renewal. They updated their playbook. They didn't rebuild their playbook. Here are the five clearest signs that your workforce strategy is still built on 2019 assumptions.
Sign One: Your Planning Is Still Purely Headcount-Focused
If your workforce plan answers only one question — "How many people do we need?" — you're missing the actual strategy. I spent eight years as CHRO at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, and early in my tenure I inherited a workforce plan that was essentially a spreadsheet of FTE targets. It looked professional. It had five-year projections. It told us nothing about whether those people had the skills we actually needed, whether they were in the right roles, or how they connected to institutional goals.
True workforce strategy answers a different set of questions. What capabilities do we need to build? What roles are expanding and which are contracting? Where do we have critical dependency on individual people? Are we developing our own talent or constantly recruiting externally? In a public university, this matters enormously because tenure protections mean you can't simply eliminate positions. You have to be intentional about where you're investing and where you're allowing positions to naturally attrite.
I see the same pattern in public sector organizations. A state agency recently came to me with a staffing crisis in their IT department — severe burnout, high turnover, positions staying open for months. Their workforce plan had predicted stable headcount. It never asked whether the work itself was sustainable, whether the skill mix was right for a digital transformation, or whether compensation was competitive. Once you shift from "how many" to "what capabilities and skills," the entire strategy changes.
Sign Two: Your Workforce Data Is Siloed and Backward-Looking
Here's what I still see constantly: HR has one system with turnover data. Finance has another with compensation spend. IT has employee counts for infrastructure planning. Nobody is looking at the whole picture, and nobody is looking forward. Your data is accurate about what happened last quarter. It tells you almost nothing about what will happen next quarter.
Workforce intelligence — real workforce intelligence — sits at the intersection of data infrastructure and interpretive judgment. It means you can see patterns that haven't yet become crises. You can identify which departments are losing high-performers to retention risk before they walk out the door. You can spot skill gaps that will become critical in eighteen months, not when the crisis hits. Most organizations have data. Very few have intelligence.
The distinction matters. Analytics tells you what happened. Intelligence tells you what's likely to happen and what you should do about it. When I was at UL Lafayette, we built a retention risk model that flagged faculty and professional staff who were exhibiting early signals of departure — decreased engagement, reduced committee participation, fewer internal collaborations. It was simple, but it forced us to have conversations early. Some people stayed because someone noticed they were struggling. Others left anyway, but we had time to plan succession. Without that forward-looking capacity, you're always managing crisis, never managing strategy.
Sign Three: Your Succession Planning Is Paper-Based and Inactive
This is the one that makes me pause in client meetings. I'll ask about succession plans and leadership development pipelines, and I'll get shown a spreadsheet that was updated two years ago. The cell next to a retiring executive's name has a name in it — a successor — but nobody's had a real conversation in eighteen months about whether that person still wants the role, whether they have the skills they'll need, or what development would close the gap.
Succession planning done right is active. It's a conversation. It's development. It's honest feedback about readiness. In higher education especially, I see institutions with deep leadership vacancies and no clear path forward because they conflated "having a name on a list" with "having a plan." A truly ready successor has been deliberately developed, has taken on expanded responsibilities, has had mentoring relationships with sitting executives, and has been transparently assessed for gaps.
The cost of not doing this right is staggering — and I've seen it up close. When you lose a senior executive without a succession plan, the search process itself becomes disruptive. Interim leadership creates drift. Institutional knowledge walks out the door. And in competitive talent markets, those gaps don't close quickly. I worked with one university that took fourteen months to fill a key provost position. In that time, strategic initiatives stalled, faculty morale declined, and they eventually hired someone from outside who didn't understand the institution's culture. That's not a recruitment failure. That's a strategy failure.
Sign Four: Technology Strategy and Talent Strategy Are Separate Conversations
This is subtle but pervasive. Your organization invests in new HR technology, new collaboration tools, maybe a return-to-office technology refresh. Meanwhile, your talent strategy is about recruiting, compensation, and development — not about how work actually gets done. These exist in separate budgets, separate committees, separate conversations.
I've watched organizations spend millions on new platforms while their workforce wasn't ready to use them. The technology enables something new, but the talent strategy doesn't evolve to take advantage of it. Or the reverse: the organization wants hybrid work but hasn't built the technology capability to make it actually functional. The technology enablement pillar of the Future-Ready Workforce Framework exists because these conversations have to be integrated. Your technology choices shape what your workforce can do. Your talent strategy shapes what technology choices matter.
At UL Lafayette, we spent considerable effort ensuring that our technology investments actually connected to our strategic talent goals — not just as tools, but as enablers. If we wanted to improve research collaboration, that shaped technology choices. If we wanted to enable distributed mentoring and professional development, that shaped how we deployed new platforms. When you align these, the multiplier effect is enormous.
Sign Five: Organizational Agility Isn't Built Into the Plan
Your 2019 workforce strategy probably assumed relatively stable conditions and predictable change. Hire for stability. Develop people slowly. Plan in five-year cycles. None of that world exists anymore. The capacity to shift strategy, reorder priorities, and move talent quickly in response to changing conditions is now a fundamental workforce capability.
This doesn't mean chaos. It means building flexibility into how you organize, where you develop people, how you deploy talent. It means not over-optimizing for the organization you have today, but building capacity for the organization you'll need tomorrow. In higher education, this is particularly hard because the institution is large, complex, and deliberately stable. But rigidity is now a vulnerability, not a strength.
The Future-Ready Workforce Framework exists because organizations need a comprehensive way to think about workforce strategy that accounts for the world we're in now. It's not one initiative or one system change. It's five integrated pillars — Workforce Intelligence, Integrated Talent Strategy, Technology Enablement, Cultural Resilience, and Governance & Compliance — that together enable an organization to compete effectively while staying aligned to its mission and values.
If you're seeing these signs, the good news is that they're fixable. But they require stepping back from tactical HR work and asking strategic questions about what your workforce actually needs to be, not what it was.