Why Federal Workforce Planning Needs Skills-Based AI
Federal agencies today face a rapidly evolving mission environment: shifting global threats, rising data complexity, and urgent public needs. To meet the moment, agencies must transform the way they plan, hire, and manage talent — shifting from static roles to dynamic readiness. A growing number are finding the answer in skills-based workforce planning powered by AI, enabled by platforms like Workday.
Shifting from Roles to Readiness
The traditional federal workforce model, built on rigid job classifications and tenure-based progression, is proving ill-suited for today’s dynamic mission requirements. “I was shocked to see that some of those positions hadn’t been reclassified in decades — some as old as 30 years,” said Erik Hall, a former Foreign Service Officer and now Senior Value Manager at Workday.
Modern challenges demand a more agile approach: one that can align talent with evolving needs in real time. That means identifying what skills your workforce actually has, what the mission requires next, and how to close that gap quickly.
Workday Skills Cloud is built on Illuminate, Workday’s AI foundation fueled by the largest, cleanest set of HR and finance data in the world.
Data-Driven by Design
But AI is only as good as its foundation. As Hall noted, “Garbage in, garbage out — or great results in, great results out.” That’s why Workday’s AI starts with trusted data and builds in security, auditability, and bias testing at every level.
Workday’s platform is aligned with NIST standards and federal AI guidance, supporting regulatory and ethical compliance. With a single security and data model across HR, finance, and operations, it gives agencies a unified, secure context for every decision.
This level of integrity isn’t new. Workday has supported complex, compliance-heavy environments — including federal agencies, healthcare organizations, and financial and higher education institutions — for more than a decade. Today, it processes over 6 billion records daily and more than 1 trillion transactions annually, giving its AI both the scale and the reliability federal missions require.
Built for Government, Backed by Experience
Workday’s proven track record in public sector transformation makes it uniquely positioned to help agencies modernize workforce planning with confidence. As the only cloud-native platform that embeds AI across HR and finance in a single system, Workday provides the data clarity and operational agility agencies need.
And in today’s environment, that clarity isn’t optional — it’s mission-critical.
Agencies realized they really didn’t have visibility into their talent pipeline. If they did, they felt they weren’t targeting all possible avenues to match the right talent with the right roles and the right skills.
Workday’s skills-based AI platform changes that. With real-time skills tracking and dynamic role matching, it empowers agencies to spot capability gaps and rapidly redeploy talent. Built-in skills ontologies connect roles and competencies across the organization creating a living map of workforce potential.
Erik Hall, Senior Value Manager, Workday
Whether it’s empowering AI-native hiring, streamlining operations, or unlocking the full potential of your workforce, Workday is helping federal leaders move from complexity to clarity — and from planning to performance.
Built for
the Mission
AI-Assisted Workforce Planning
Managing agency personnel—often numbering in the thousands and deployed globally across a range of missions—presents a complex workforce planning challenge. These individuals bring diverse skill sets, language proficiencies, and clearance levels, and must often be assigned to projects that vary in duration and urgency. For example, assembling a mission-critical team with specific requirements can involve a multi-step, time-consuming process. Project leads may need to request personnel through fulfillment teams who first search within their own unit, then across other divisions. A key obstacle is the lack of real-time visibility into internal talent, which can lead to the premature use of costly third-party contractors, even when qualified internal personnel may be available. These inefficiencies are compounded by fragmented systems and reliance on spreadsheets, making it difficult to gain a unified view of available talent.
Workday can help by delivering a secure, cloud-based solution tailored to the needs of federal agencies, offering real-time insights into workforce readiness, skills, and availability. Agencies can pull in third-party data to help generate predictive forecasts and leverage sophisticated anomaly detection to uncover changes in spending, performance, and other trends. With Workday’s unified data model and AI-driven skills intelligence, agencies can streamline workforce planning, reduce dependency on external resources, and respond more quickly and strategically to evolving mission demands.
We’re replacing the time-consuming processes, repetitive tasks, and lack of information. Not people.
Erik Hall, Senior Value Manager, Workday
AI That Works Where It Matters
Skills-based workforce planning and resourcing is just the start. Daily workflows are another area ripe for change, but outdated systems can still make it difficult for employees to complete basic tasks.
As a diplomat, Hall saw firsthand how legacy systems create barriers to basic productivity. “Let’s say I need to deliver a démarche or negotiate bilateral agreements with a foreign leader. I don’t have time to click through 15 screens to approve an expense report,” he said. “These inefficiencies prevent people from doing the meaningful work they were hired to do.”
Workday’s platform is designed to reduce the friction of day-to-day government work, freeing employees to focus on mission-critical tasks. From streamlining approvals and surfacing insights to proactively flagging anomalies before they become problems, Workday’s embedded AI is built to accelerate, assist, and transform how work gets done. And most importantly, its AI is human-centered, designed to augment federal employees, not replace them.
The bottom line is that a modern workforce strategy means aligning talent, data and decisions — and building the systems to keep up with the mission as it evolves.
Erik Hall, Senior Value Manager, Workday
Workday’s skills-based AI platform changes that. With real-time skills tracking and dynamic role matching, it empowers agencies to spot capability gaps and rapidly redeploy talent. Built-in skills ontologies connect roles and competencies across the organization creating a living map of workforce potential.
Workday Skills Cloud is built on Illuminate, Workday’s AI foundation fueled by the largest, cleanest set of HR and finance data in the world.