Our Integrated Talent Management Strategies class was excited to hear from David Fineman, Vice President, Workforce Planning at PTC, a global technology company with over 6,000 employees across 80 offices in 30 countries.
Dave described Workforce Planning as a key component of Business Planning, with organizations needing to connect their talent strategy - including required skills, organization design, work processes, technology and staffing requirements - to the current and future demands of the business. As Dave described so well, this objective has become more important, and more challenging, as businesses have experienced multiple disruptive forces such as the pandemic, new technologies like AI, machine learning and robotics, the explosion of data availability, contingent work and other changing employee preferences.
Dave presented a compelling Workforce Planning model to our students, involving having the right roles and skills, in the right locations, at the right cost, in the right organization design and at the right time, all within the right approach for the organization, including the change management efforts critical for adoption and implementation,
He also emphasized the myriad partners with whom the HCM professional must work, such as the Board of Directors and Executive Leadership, functional peers such as Finance, M&A, Corporate Real Estate and Technology, a diverse set of HCM subject matter experts and, of course, employees, contingent workers, labor organizations and vendor partners.
With all this opportunity and complexity, what was Dave's advice for our students? "Know your company's business model and strategic objectives and be able to speak intelligently and confidently with your business partners. They want to know that you understand and appreciate their goals and talent needs. To be credible and valuable, you must act like a true business advisor, more than as an HR functional expert."
Our students' reactions? They were enthralled to hear from Dave as he connected so much of what we are learning in the course and in the Columbia University Master of Science in Human Capital Management program to Dave's decades of real-world experience.
