Senior Manager - Strategic Workforce Planning

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. 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.