Establishing a Strategic Workforce Planning Framework for Sport Management in the UK: A Practice-Based Knowledge Transfer Partnership Approach

Statement of Relevance to Professional Practice

This abstract presents a current UK Research Innovation (UKRI) funded Knowledge Transfer Partnership (KTP) project between Cardiff Metropolitan University and the Chartered Institute for the Management of Sport and Physical Activity (CIMSPA) initiated in 2024 and due for completion in 2026, aiming to directly impact national macro strategic workforce planning in the UK sport and physical activity industry.

Purpose

This work includes identifying industry-wide national occupational supply and demand risks and exposing skills gaps and mismatches by exploring methodologies that can support the analysis of macro sports workforce stability and ensure its long-term impact and relevance.

Background

In response to the EU recommendations presented by the ERASMUS+ funded Developing Sport Managers and Leaders across Europe project (Osborne et al., 2023), a UK university-industry partnership funded by a KTP Grant of £212,000 from UKRI is establishing a national research framework and data governance system to investigate systemic macro workforce planning. Whilst human capital and strategic human resource management (e.g. Taylor et al., 2024; Weight et al., 2021) are used as organisational-level theoretical frames in sports management, this myopic lens limits other theoretical considerations needed to address aggregate systemic workforce issues (e.g. Figueroa et al., 2019). In adopting a macro workforce planning stance, the partnership aims to acknowledge the limitations in the current sport management literature, ensure the identification of relevant research questions and acknowledge the need to ground empirical data with a diverse theoretical framework that can facilitate actionable solutions for sectoral leaders and policymakers in the UK sports industry.

Design and Implementation

The project partnership has adapted the International Organisation for Standardisation definition that workforce planning is the systematic and continuous process of identification, analysis and planning of organisational or sector-wide needs in terms of people specifically identifying current, transitional and future workforce demand and supply to explicitly focus on the immediate and long-term human resource requirements of an organisation or sector (ISO 30409:2016). Contemporary workforce planning uses hard and soft labour market intelligence (LMI) and individualistic LMI data (Alexander et al., 2019) to identify workforce trends and risks (Sloan, 2019). This balanced scorecard of data (Osborne et al., 2023) aims to provide an inductive starting point, identifying relevant workforce-related patterns or latent issues to be investigated and explained. The practical interpretation of systemic data sources aims to inform national sports policy, linked workforce development objectives and the shape of national education systems impacting sports occupations (Zaber et al., 2019).

In the first phase of the two-year project, CIMSPA has initiated the development of a National Sport & Physical Activity Workforce Observatory (SPAWO), aiming to support macro workforce planning capabilities beyond detailed descriptive analysis to include diagnostic and predictive analysis exploring career lifecycles, education supply trends, demand, growth, attrition and replacement trends (Gibson, 2021). The SPAWO Board has agreed to establish a Trusted Research Environment (TRE) that will promote public access to key data dashboards whilst in parallel supporting the highest data governance and security to allow a national network of researchers to undertake ethical research for the public good (McDonald et al., 2023). The KTP project has facilitated stakeholder consultation events with senior industry leaders across the UK; led by the CIMSPA Head of Insight and Business Transformation and the KTP Associate Officer, these consultations have identified key strategic questions and over sixty data sources needed to answer them, including:

Workforce Planning: National Labour-market Analytics, Employer Skills Surveys.
Workforce Development: National Educational Data, Learner Outcomes.
Workforce Management: National Skills Diagnostics, Business Surveys.
Outcomes, Reflections and Future Development

This practice-based project represents the UK's first comprehensive approach to developing a national strategic workforce planning framework in the sport and physical activity industry. In supporting this ambition, industry practitioners and scholars have initiated a detailed identification, categorisation, and use of strategic data sources outlined by the ISO30409 (2016) standard to progress macro-level scenario planning analysis, demand and supply forecasting, skills and knowledge gaps or mismatches, and risk profiling to identify immediate and longer-term macro vulnerabilities and to support national and regional workforce plans and influence the scale and scope of workforce development systems. Phase 2 of the project is establishing a TRE using nationally benchmarked design standards. The TRE includes a metadata catalogue that will support collective industry and academic research activity and the exploration of a diverse, layered framework of theories (e.g. complexity theory, institutionalism) to explore and explain system-wide issues and trends that extend beyond the traditionally applied micro-organisational focus of human capital and human resource management theories used in sport management. This sensible balance of evidence and abstraction ensures that any workforce-related scholarship is empirically robust but theoretically underpinned.