Scenario Planning for Staffing Requirement Assessment: Why Public Authorities Need to Think Ahead Now

The large post-war generation is retiring over the coming years, and many public authorities only notice the gap once the post is already vacant.

Workforce planning is still seen by many public authorities as a purely administrative task: fill posts when they become vacant, launch recruitment when the need is acute. This reactive stance will not be enough for the years ahead. Anyone who waits until the gap shows up on the organisation chart has already lost valuable time, time needed for recruitment, induction and knowledge transfer. This is exactly where scenario planning comes in: it shifts the focus from current staffing levels to the developments that are foreseeably heading towards an authority.

Workforce Planning as the Foundation of Public Administration

Workforce planning and staffing requirement assessment form the basis for all further personnel decisions in an authority. The aim is to have enough qualified staff available at all times to carry out tasks properly and economically. This works best in close cooperation with organisational management. The organisational units of an authority use established assessment methods to determine which tasks need to be carried out, to what extent and at what quality. This is what the actual staffing requirement is derived from, and only on this basis can staffing plans, recruitment projects and qualification measures be sensibly planned.

For federal government and local authorities, these methods are set out in detail in organisational handbooks. The Federal Audit Office has also formulated its own requirements for staffing requirement assessment, which authorities must take into account in their planning. Staffing requirement assessment therefore follows traceable, verified standards and is not left to the discretion of individual departments. Applying these standards consistently gives authorities a basis on which personnel decisions can be justified to politicians and the public. This matters especially when posts have to be justified to the finance department or the budget authority: a robust requirement assessment is the decisive argument here.

Why Future Scenarios Make the Difference

The real lever lies in the ability to determine staffing requirements for different future scenarios, reaching beyond the present. Demographic change, growing task volumes, digitalisation projects or shifting political priorities alter an authority’s staffing needs over the years, often faster than staffing plans can be adjusted. An authority that only knows its current requirement is planning backwards and only reacts once shortfalls have already appeared.

Scenario-based staffing assessment addresses this directly. It asks how requirements would develop if certain assumptions occur: higher turnover through retirement, an additional statutory task, a structural shift in responsibilities. Authorities that work with several scenarios can make decisions on recruitment, qualification and internal redeployment early, and gain valuable lead time as a result. The benefit lies less in a single, perfectly accurate forecast than in the range: an authority that thinks through several plausible developments is better prepared for each of them than one that assumes only a single future. Tools are now available for putting this into practice, allowing authorities to work through their staffing requirements across different future scenarios systematically, rather than rebuilding every scenario by hand in spreadsheets.

Turnover Is Predictable, If You Look

A large part of future staffing requirements can be identified early. Resignations can only be forecast to a limited extent, but retirements can be predicted very accurately. An authority’s age structure already shows today when larger numbers of departures are due. This insight is becoming central to many authorities over the coming years. The large post-war generation is increasingly reaching retirement age, noticeably increasing the recruitment needs of public authorities.

HR controlling and regular requirement assessments based on age structure provide reliable early warning signals here. They show where departures are looming, and at the same time point to the areas where staff are under particular strain and may therefore be considering a move themselves. Anyone who evaluates these signals systematically prepares recruitment, succession planning and knowledge transfer well before a post actually becomes vacant. Knowledge transfer in particular deserves close attention: experience built up over decades in a department cannot be passed on to a successor in the last few weeks before retirement. An authority that recognises retirement waves two to three years ahead can bring successors in and train them while the experienced member of staff is still in post.

What This Means in Practice

For HR managers in public administration, this means in concrete terms: staffing requirement assessment should regularly include several future scenarios, rather than simply extending the status quo. This requires a robust age structure analysis, close cooperation with organisational management, and the willingness to name requirements even when they will only take effect in three or five years. Authorities that use this lead time gain time for recruitment, induction and knowledge retention, particularly in the areas most affected by the coming retirement waves.

In my book Personalmanagement in der öffentlichen Verwaltung (HR management in public administration), I describe in the chapter on workforce planning how such scenarios can be built up methodically and what role established assessment methods play in this. My colleague Evanthia Lilli has also drawn on her consulting experience to summarise the formats that make staffing assessment projects succeed, showing how theory and project practice fit together. An authority that establishes scenario planning as a fixed part of its HR work gains an advantage that only pays off fully in a few years’ time, but lays the foundation for stable service delivery today.