In March 2021, the Australian Public Service Commission released Delivering for Tomorrow: the APS Workforce Strategy 2025. The strategy established a whole-of-APS approach to building and maintaining a high-performing, diverse and flexible workforce, and has provided additional focus on the importance of strategic workforce planning across the APS.

At Finance, our workforce plan is centred on four key people-focused strategy areas to support a high-performing workforce. These are:

• Bring (attracting and recruiting the right people)
• Build (building capability)
• Balance (workforce composition)
• Bind (retention and talent management).

Our workforce planning processes continue to align to provide an integrated approach to decision-making, prioritisation of resources and critical capability areas. The Department has made progress to implement the APS Job Family Model. The Job Family Model is one of the APS’ key workforce planning tools and enables us to better analyse and plan the Department’s workforce to respond to critical priorities, support mobility and identify opportunities for capability development.

Finance’s people sourcing strategy (Figure 5) supports our approach to workforce planning. We use a range of sourcing options to attract the right people with the right skills in a timely way.

Figure 5: Finance’s Sourcing Strategy

The key objectives of the Department’s people sourcing strategy are to:

• attract quality candidates and engage them early in their career through effective recruitment processes
• mobilise Finance staff in a timely manner and with streamlined processes
• bring quality people into the Department through Finance’s registers, merit pools and specialist recruitment processes
• engage effectively with entities across the APS to access quality people from merit pools, through talent management strategies and secondments.

The Finance workforce strategy will be refreshed in 2021–22 to ensure alignment with the Department’s Corporate Plan, and to reflect identified areas of focus from the annual employee census results, lessons learned from our experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic and the APS Workforce Strategy.