Senior Manager – Strategic Workforce Planning

Salary: Competitive per annum

Hours: 37.5 per week, Monday to Friday

Location: Hybrid, 3 days a week in our VHQ, Crawley

Contract: 6 month secondment / FTC

Closing Date: 7th July 2025

At Virgin Atlantic, we are committed to ensuring that our workforce is strategically aligned with our business goals. We are looking for a visionary leader to join our Partnering and Performance team as the Senior Manager – Strategic Workforce Planning. This role is key to leading the strategic workforce planning team and organisational design strategy, ensuring we are resourced effectively to drive growth, efficiency, and innovation.

As the Senior Manager – Strategic Workforce Planning, you will lead the strategic workforce planning team and organisational design strategy across the whole of Virgin Atlantic. You will ensure that we are resourced in the most effective way and have structures in place that drive growth, efficiency, and innovation not only in the short to medium term but also long term in line with company strategy. You will work closely with business leaders, Finance, Data & Insight teams, and other key stakeholders to shape, advise, and identify opportunities to continually optimise our structures and performance.

Day to day:

• Lead the strategic planning and execution of the annual budget, reforecast, and organisational design health-check process, ensuring alignment with business objectives.
• Define and drive key organisational metrics to benchmark and analyse structural effectiveness, including spans and layers, workforce composition, and overall organisational health.
• Develop and govern a proactive headcount management strategy, ensuring the organisation remains optimally structured to achieve its strategic goals efficiently and sustainably.
• Deliver executive-level insights and recommendations on organisational design trends, providing data-driven analysis on structure, efficiency, and impact on business performance.
• Serve as the organisation’s authority on structural design, maintaining deep expertise on the approved operating model and influencing senior leadership in shaping a future-fit organisation.
• Integrate external market intelligence with internal workforce analytics to anticipate and define short- and long-term workforce requirements.
• Advise and influence leadership on critical workforce composition, skills, and capabilities, ensuring the organisation is optimally structured to execute its strategic vision.
• Lead workforce forecasting efforts to enable long-term success and establish a unified, strategic approach to workforce planning.
• Champion diversity as a fundamental pillar of workforce planning, embedding inclusive strategies to future-proof the organisation and drive innovation, resilience, and market leadership.
• Lead cross-functional collaboration with People Partners, Employee Relations, Industrial Relations, Recruitment, and Legal to ensure all people change projects are expertly delivered.
• Continuously evaluate and refine workforce planning and organisational design processes to ensure efficiency and leader satisfaction.
• Provide thought leadership on the future of work, ensuring that we are horizon scanning and leading the way in innovative HR practices.
• Lead the Organisational Design team, providing expert counsel and ensuring high performance through effective performance management and development.

About you:

• Educated to degree level with relevant professional qualifications (e.g., CIPD Level 7) or equivalent experience.
• Proven experience in a senior workforce planning role within a complex, matrixed organisation managing competing priorities with compliance, governance and budgetary accountability.
• In-depth experience in supporting and partnering with business leaders to drive organisational performance through structural design.
• Evidence of leveraging data and insights to shape strategy and measure impact utilising PowerBI, Microsoft Excel, and PowerPoint.
• Numerate and highly competent analytical skills with experience in headcount control and reporting.
• Evidence of excellent communication, influencing, and interpersonal skills.
• Working confidently and credibly with senior managers/leaders, forming strong personal relationships.
• Experience of strong coaching and advisory capability across all levels of leadership to simplify complex problems and solutions into succinct presentations and narratives.
• Management experience ideally within the aviation industry.

Our recipe for leadership:

At Virgin Atlantic, our leaders empower teams to thrive through collaboration, innovation, and excellence. Explore our Leadership Recipe and discover the 20 core ingredients that define what it means to lead with us, driving our mission to be the most loved travel company and achieve sustainable profit.

Be yourself:

Our customers come from all walks of life and so do our colleagues. That’s why we’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and actively encourage applications from all backgrounds. At Virgin Atlantic, we believe everyone can take on the world - no matter your age, gender, gender identity, gender expression, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disabilities, religion, or beliefs. We celebrate difference and everything that makes our colleagues unique by upholding an inclusive environment in which we can all thrive.

To make your journey with us accessible and individual to you, we encourage you to let us know if you’d like a little extra help with your application, or if you have any individual requirements at any stage along your recruitment journey. We are here to support you, so please reach out to our team.