Most companies plan short-term headcount. Very few plan long-term strategic capability. McKinsey's HR Monitor 2026 shows just how wide that gap has become — and it matches exactly what we're seeing on the ground in Northern Europe. Over the spring and summer, we sat down with tens of HR leaders across the region, and the same picture kept repeating itself, conversation after conversation.
Almost everyone we spoke with agreed on one thing: the skills their organization needs in three years will not be the skills it has today. Almost none of them could say, with confidence, exactly which skills those will be, who has them today, or how big the gap is going to become. Ask them what share of that gap could be closed by reskilling people already on the team, versus hiring externally, and the room usually goes quiet — there is no data to answer the question.
Only 11 percent of organizations plan workforce needs three years or more into the future, based on the strategic needs of the organization. Chapter 1 of McKinsey's newly released HR Monitor 2026, a benchmark survey of roughly 1,300 HR professionals and 5,500 employees across ten countries, finds that most organizations plan around how many people they need in which roles, short-term — not around what those roles will actually need to be able to do to make the organization's strategy come true in the upcoming years. In other words: most HR functions are planning headcount for a workforce shape that is already changing under their feet.
At Intito, this is the gap we have set out to close for our clients, combining two things that are usually kept apart: a structured method for translating strategy into everyday, role-specific competencies, and a planning platform that can turn that data into scenarios and decisions across the whole organization, which is what the rest of this article walks through.
We recognize this pattern from nearly every conversation we have had with HR leaders in Finland, Sweden and Norway this year. It tends to show up in one of three ways.
Some organizations simply have not defined which capabilities are strategically critical, so there is no shared language for "the skills that matter" beyond job titles and formal qualifications. Others have done the definition work — often as part of a strategy exercise — but have no structured view of how those capability needs will shift over the next three years, so the definition sits in a slide deck rather than in a living plan. And a third group has done both, but has no reliable, up-to-date way of knowing who in the organization actually holds which competencies today, at what level, and with what appetite to develop further.
This last point is where the McKinsey data gets particularly sharp. HR professionals in the survey estimate that 23 percent of employees currently lack at least some of the skills their role requires — but the report's authors note this likely understates the real gap, since McKinsey's own research expects skill shifts in nearly every occupation by 2030. Just as tellingly, only 57 percent of organizations that say they have a skills taxonomy actually connect it to their workforce planning process. Having a competence framework and using it to plan are two very different achievements, and most organizations have only managed the first.
The tools gap is part of the explanation. The HR technology most companies have invested in over the past decade is very good at supporting an individual's learning and development journey: a personal training plan, a course catalogue in LMS, a performance conversation. It is much less capable of answering the questions a leadership team actually needs answered: Which strategic capabilities are we short on, in which units, and by how much? What happens to that gap if we grow 15 percent in one market and shrink in another? What is the cost — in hiring, reskilling, or restructuring — of closing it in eighteen months versus three years? Those are planning questions, not learning-administration questions, and they require different data architecture entirely. The lesson is not "invest more in L&D content". It is "in addition, invest in knowing, with precision, where the investment needs to go", which is a strategic workforce planning problem, not a course-catalogue problem.
The organizations that get this right treat competence data the same way they treat financial data: owned centrally, structured consistently, updated on a rhythm, and connected directly to scenario planning and forecasting — not scattered across individual development plans that nobody aggregates. This is precisely the shift McKinsey's report calls for: moving from operational, headcount-based planning to strategic, capability- and scenario-based planning, anchored to the business strategy rather than sitting alongside it.
Image 1: - The xPA cycle: strategic competence planning as a continuous loop — plan, simulate, decide, forecast, and back again.
The method — which we call the Guidin Praxis Method (GPM) based on our collaboration with Guidin — starts where most competence frameworks stop: not with a generic list of "future skills," but with the leadership team explicitly identifying which high-level capabilities the strategy actually depends on, and then working with team leads to translate those into concrete role-specific competencies that people recognize in their daily work. Only once that translation has happened does measurement — of current skill level, relevance, and each person's interest in developing further — produce data that leadership can actually act on.
That data then flows into an Intito Extended Planning & Analysis (xPA) platform that we have implemented for a range of clients — the same platform many organizations already use for FTE and compensation planning linked to financial planning and forecasting. This is deliberate: competence planning belongs next to quantitative workforce planning, not in a separate system. In practice, this means leadership can build and compare scenarios, see where the biggest capability gaps and risks sit, model the cost of closing them through upskilling, reskilling, hiring or restructuring, and then track progress against the plan — with historical data explaining variation over time rather than every planning cycle starting from a blank page. Increasingly, agentic AI is being layered onto this cycle too, helping surface gaps and options faster than a purely manual process could.
The result is a skills and capability management framework (see picture below) that runs from strategic direction-setting through measurement, planning and execution, and back into forecasting — deliberately designed so that competence planning becomes a recurring leadership rhythm rather than a one-off HR project that quietly goes stale.
Image 2: The GPM + xPA operating model: nine steps connecting strategic direction-setting, measurement, planning and execution into one recurring leadership rhythm.
McKinsey's report frames 2026 as a genuine turning point for the HR function: the moment to move from functional excellence within HR to system-level influence over how the whole organization adapts. Strategic workforce planning is where that influence must start, because every other priority in the report — hiring, learning, retention, the HR operating model itself — depends on knowing what capabilities the organization will need and where it currently stands against that need.
Most organizations still can't answer that with any rigor. Closing the gap doesn't require guessing the future perfectly. It requires a defined set of strategic capabilities, a disciplined way of translating them into everyday competencies people recognize, and a planning platform that treats competence data with the same seriousness as headcount and cost data.
Organizations that build that discipline now will not be the ones scrambling to explain a widening skills gap in three years. They will be the ones who saw it coming and had already started closing it.
Intito helps organizations across the Nordics and DACH build strategic and operational workforce planning capability, from traditional FTE and compensation planning linked to financial planning and forecasting, to strategic competence planning built on the Guidin Praxis Method combined with Intito Extended Planning & Analysis platform. Get in touch to discuss where your organization stands.