Currently, the cantonal administration does not apply a standardised procedure in the field of human resource planning. Within the decentralised structure of the cantonal administration, each agency is entitled to manage its workforce needs based on their own judgement. For the time being, the rather outdated tool of a personnel plan is used as a control mechanism for human resource planning. In order to examine how the workforce planning within the organisation can be made more transparent and effective, this thesis aims to identify the most important gaps between the contemporary theory and the curretly applied processes.

In order to answer the research question, traditional desk research served to establish a broad overview of relevant literature concerning concepts such as strategic management, strategic human resource management, and human resource planning. Further, contemporary management tools for operative workforce planning were researched and described to build a solid basis for possible management solutions to be recommended. In as second step, data about the status-quo of human resource planning in various agencies of Canton Baselland was gathered through personal qualitative semi-structured interviews. Finally, this approach enabled the authors to identify gaps between the literature and the procedures currently applied in the cantonal administration.

The paper provides the cantonal administration with recommendations which might help making the human resource planning process more transparent and effective. Further, it indicates which tools potentially could be applied in order to standardise and improve the workforce planning. The conducted gap-analysis revealed that the identified issues can be clustered into six different focus fields which further can be segmented into various sub-clusters. These focus fields cover topics such as business line organisation, the cooperation between different HR functions and business lines, as well as the workforce planning process from a qualitative and quantitative perspective. In addition, the topics of recruitment & selection and talent management were briefly discussed. The main issues discovered within these areas included matters of flexibility, heterogeneity and communication. The derived recommendations attempt to address these issues and may be a starting point for the cantonal administration for future improvement.