Editorial
Every few years, workforce planning gets a rebrand.
Jobs became too rigid, so we broke them into tasks. Tasks were too granular, so we mapped them to skills. Now, some argue that we should plan workforces around outcomes, letting workers and AI determine the "how" while leaders define the "what."
Each iteration climbs higher on the abstraction ladder. Each one sounds more sophisticated in a strategy deck or an HR transformation initiative. But there's a pattern here worth noticing: the work itself hasn't changed as much as we might believe. We're just finding new ways to describe it (and adding in AI, of course).
Which raises a question. Is outcome-based workforce planning a fundamentally new model, or is it just cleaner language for what good managers have always done? And if it is new, who actually benefits from the shift?
We Already Know Job Descriptions Aren’t Perfect
Deloitte's research on workforce planning notes that only 19% of executives still think jobs are the best way to structure work. Meanwhile, 71% of workers say they already do work outside their job descriptions.
Translation: outcome-based work is already happening. We just didn't call it that.
The traditional job description was always a fiction. It has and continues to be a tidy box on an org chart that never quite captured what people actually did.
Outcome-based planning acknowledges this and tries to formalize it. Define the results you need, give people autonomy and step back. The problem is that most organizations can't even explain what someone's current job is becoming, let alone define clear outcomes and delegate the rest.
According to Deloitte's research, 93% of organizations say moving away from the job construct is important or very important to their success.
Yet the gap between belief and practice is wide. Jobs are still, by and large, how the vast majority of people get hired, evaluated and moved through organizations. Now we're adding another layer of abstraction on top of a system that hasn't finished the last transition? Are we just creating a strategy that will ultimately sit in a PowerPoint deck until the next rebrand?
Outcomes Aren’t Easy For Everyone to Understand
Here's another tension: Outcome-based planning might improve things for organizational planners, but it's a step backward for individuals.
Jobs were rigid but legible. You knew roughly what a marketing manager or software engineer did. Skills were flexible and portable. You could take Python, stakeholder management or financial modeling to your next role.
Outcomes? They're flexible for organizations but opaque for workers.
If you "delivered a 15% reduction in cycle time" at your last company, does that transfer to the next one? Maybe, maybe not. The context matters, the team matters, the tools matter. You can't shop outcomes across employers the way you could shop skills or even job titles.
For workforce planners, outcome-based models are cleaner. You're allocating capacity to goals, not matching skills to tasks. You can staff fluidly, redeploy people, and blend in AI without rewriting job specs.
For individuals, it's less clear what you're building, what you're worth, and where you fit next.
The move from jobs to skills to outcomes isn't a clean evolution. It's a shift in who benefits from the abstraction. Organizations gain flexibility. Workers lose career legibility.
You Don't Need a New Model to Improve
The push toward skills-based or outcome-based models comes with an implicit assumption: you have to transform your entire system to improve workforce management.
You don't.
The real lessons from Deloitte's research aren't about adopting a new planning model. They're about things you can do right now, in whatever model you're already using.
For example, only 34% of workers say their employer has clearly communicated how AI will affect their jobs. That's a communication problem, not a planning model issue. If you're bringing in new tools or new expectations, say so. People can handle change. They can't handle silence.
The "hidden workforce" framing allegedly unlocked by skills- or outcome-based workforce planning is useful not because it unlocks some secret talent pool, but because it exposes how narrow your filters have been.
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You don't need an outcome-based model to hire the veteran with adjacent skills or the caregiver without a degree. You just need to stop screening them out. That's a hiring decision, not a transformation.
Give people a way to describe what they're building. Whether you call it a job, a skill or an outcome, employees need career clarity. They need to know what they're getting better at and how it translates to their next opportunity. If your planning model makes that harder to see, employees won’t buy into it.
Start Where You Are, Not Where the Deck Says You Should Be
Outcome-based workforce planning might streamline organizational strategy, but it doesn't solve the fundamentals most companies are still struggling with.
If you can't explain what's changing, hire beyond credential filters or give people clarity about what they're building, switching models won't fix it. Stay in jobs mode if that's where you are. Just do the work that makes any model functional: explain what's changing, expand the talent pool you're willing to consider and give people something concrete to build toward.
The gap between models isn't as wide as the consulting decks suggest. The things that make outcome-based planning work are the same things that make any model work.
And if you do move to outcome-based planning, remember this: you owe workers a better answer to the question they're already asking: What am I building here, and where does it take me next? Making workforce planning a little easier at the expense of employee experience is never going to work in the long term.
Editor's Note: What else is happening in the world of organizational planning?
- Workforce Planners Say AI Isn't Ready for Prime Time — The volatility of the current business environment is making workforce planning tough. AI can help, but not in the way you might think.
- Why Talent Acquisition's Silo Is Finally Crumbling — Talent acquisition and talent management have been an odd couple for years now. But the truth is, integrating the two offers significant advantages.
- Companies Don't Know Their Own Talent. AI Can Change That — Companies know less about their employees than LinkedIn does. That's a problem.
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