Senior Manager - Strategic Workforce Planning

ENGINEERINGUK; Crawley; Hybrid; GBP 60,000 - 100,000; Full time

Job description

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Senior Manager - Strategic Workforce Planning

View more categories View less categories Sector Operations and Facilities Management ,Technology Role Senior Manager Contract Type Permanent Hours Full Time

Job Details

Salary: Competitive per annum

Hours: 37.5 per week, Monday to Friday

Location: Hybrid, 3 days a week in our VHQ, Crawley

Contract: 6 month secondment / FTC

Closing Date: 7th May 2025

In a nutshell

At Virgin Atlantic, we are committed to ensuring that our workforce is strategically aligned with our business goals. We are looking for a visionary leader to join our Partnering and Performance team as the Senior Manager - Strategic Workforce Planning. This role is key to leading the strategic workforce planning team and organisational design strategy, ensuring we are resourced effectively to drive growth, efficiency, and innovation.

As the Senior Manager - Strategic Workforce Planning, you will lead the strategic workforce planning team and organisational design strategy across whole of Virgin Atlantic. You will ensure that we are resourced in the most effective way and have structures in place that drive growth, efficiency, and innovation not only in the short to medium term but also long term in line with company strategy. You will work closely with business leaders, Finance, Data & Insight teams, and other key stakeholders to shape, advise, and identify opportunities to continually optimise our structures and performance.

Day to day

• Lead the strategic planning and execution of the annual budget, reforecast, and organisational design health-check process, ensuring alignment with business objectives.
• Define and drive key organisational metrics to benchmark and analyse structural effectiveness, including spans and layers, workforce composition, and overall organisational health.
• Develop and govern a proactive headcount management strategy, ensuring the organisation remains optimally structured to achieve its strategic goals efficiently and sustainably.
• Deliver executive-level insights and recommendations on organisational design trends, providing data-driven analysis on structure, efficiency, and impact on business performance.
• Serve as the organisation's authority on structural design, maintaining deep expertise on the approved operating model and influencing senior leadership in shaping a future-fit organisation.
• Integrate external market intelligence with internal workforce analytics to anticipate and define short- and long-term workforce requirements.
• Advise and influence leadership on critical workforce composition, skills, and capabilities, ensuring the organisation is optimally structured to execute its strategic vision.
• Lead workforce forecasting efforts to enable long-term success and establish a unified, strategic approach to workforce planning.
• Champion diversity as a fundamental pillar of workforce planning, embedding inclusive strategies to future-proof the organisation and drive innovation, resilience, and market leadership.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration with People Partners, Employee Relations, Industrial Relations, Recruitment, and Legal to ensure all people change projects are expertly delivered.
• Continuously evaluate and refine workforce planning and organisational design processes to ensure efficiency and leader satisfaction.
• Provide thought leadership on the future of work, ensuring that we are horizon scanning and leading the way in innovative HR practices.
• Lead the Organisational Design team, providing expert counsel and ensuring high performance through effective performance management and development.

About you

• Educated to degree level with relevant professional qualifications (e.g., CIPD Level 7) or equivalent experience.
• Proven experience in a senior workforce planning role within a complex, matrixed organisation managing competing priorities with compliance, governance and budgetary accountability.
• In-depth experience in supporting and partnering with business leaders to drive organisational performance through structural design.
• Evidence of leveraging data and insights to shape strategy and measure impact utilising PowerBI, Microsoft Excel, and PowerPoint.
• Numerate and highly competent analytical skills with experience in headcount control and reporting.
• Evidence of excellent communication, influencing, and interpersonal skills. Working confidently and credibly with senior managers/leaders, forming strong personal relationships.
• Experience of strong coaching and advisory capability across all levels of leadership to simplify complex problems and solutions into succinct presentations and narratives.
• Management experience ideally within aviation industry.

Our recipe for leadership

At Virgin Atlantic, our leaders empower teams to thrive through collaboration, innovation, and excellence. Explore our Leadership Recipe and discover the 20 core ingredients that define what it means to lead with us, driving our mission to be the most loved travel company and achieve sustainable profit. Want to learn more? Click here

Be yourself

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our colleagues. That's why we're proud to be an equal opportunity employer and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. At Virgin Atlantic, we believe everyone can take on the world - no matter your age, gender, gender identity, gender expression, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities, religion, or beliefs. We celebrate difference and everything that makes our colleagues unique by upholding an inclusive environment in which we can all thrive. So that everyone at Virgin Atlantic can be themselves and know they belong.

To make your journey with us accessible and individual to you, we encourage you to let us know if you'd like a little extra help with your application, or if you have any individual requirements at any stage along your recruitment journey. We are here to support you, so please reach out to our team, ( [email protected] ) feeling confident that we've got your individual considerations covered.

Company

Richard Branson founded Virgin Atlantic in 1984 with the intention of shaking up the aviation industry. Since then, we’ve grown from a small team, one 747 plane and a single route, to a global network that employs thousands of wonderful people worldwide.

We’re not just your average airline. We’re a family-centric one who recognises togetherness as a hugely important aspect of life. We support and care about our employees and their families, which makes Virgin Atlantic a special place to work and the long-haul airline our customers fall in love with.

When it comes to our people, they’re a passionate lot, united in creating something different. It’s always been like this. It’s in our DNA, and it was ignited within us from the moment we started flying. So, step on board, get ready to find your purpose, embrace your human spirit and let it fly.

Our ways of working

We’re on a mission to become the most loved travel company, but with this comes great responsibility. We must support all of our people to embrace a growth mindset. To think like a start-up and act like an owner of Virgin Atlantic and to live our values every day. Our ways of working are designed to reflect the balance of happiness, productivity, collaboration, and team spirit that make us uniquely Virgin. We have built our approach on six core principles, recognising work as an activity, not a place. The focus is less on when and where people work, collaborate, or learn, but on their performance and outcomes. This is built on a foundation of trust and celebrates the diversity of our people, embracing that we all have different work-life considerations and varying times when our energy is highest.

Our people & networks

At Virgin Atlantic, we want to inspire everyone to take on the world, championing inclusivity, activism, and challenger spirit. It guides us in everything we do as we strive to make progress on the issues that matter most. We know difference is a strength, enabling us to be a force for good for our employees, customers, and communities. We aim to be an employer of choice, and our purpose, the belief that drives us, is that everyone can take on the world. We’re committed to bringing together a workforce that reflects the society we live in, creating an environment that supports diversity, equity, and inclusion, and allowing all our people to bring their whole selves to work.

Supported by their own Executive Ally, our four employee networks are employee-led communities where our people can connect, celebrate and support each other. The networks work together to raise awareness of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion across the business and, through regular conversation, inform the actions we need to take as an organisation to create an environment where everyone feels they belong.

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