Senior Manager - Strategic Workforce Planning - Crawley

Virgin Atlantic; Crawley; Hybrid; GBP 70,000 - 90,000; Full time

Job summary

Virgin Atlantic is seeking a Senior Manager for Strategic Workforce Planning. This role involves leading a workforce planning team, ensuring alignment with business objectives, and providing strategic insights for organizational design. Ideal candidates will have a strong background in workforce planning with a focus on analytical and influencing skills, all while fostering an inclusive environment.

Qualifications

• Proven experience in a senior workforce planning role.
• In-depth experience in supporting business leaders.
• Excellent communication and interpersonal skills.

Responsibilities

• Lead strategic workforce planning and execution of annual budget.
• Develop headcount management strategy for organizational effectiveness.
• Deliver insights on organizational design trends.

Skills

Analytical skills

Communication

Influencing

Team collaboration

Education

Degree level education

CIPD Level 7 or equivalent experience

Tools

PowerBI

Microsoft Excel

PowerPoint

Job description

Senior Manager - Strategic Workforce Planning - Crawley

View more categories View less categories Sector Sports jobs ,Management Job Type Full Time

Senior Manager - Strategic Workforce Planning - Crawley

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 July 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.

Be yourself - Our differences make us stronger

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, ([e-mail])feeling confident that we've got your individual considerations covered.

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

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