Who is
David
Edwards?
Here's SOMETHING ABOUT ME
My route into workforce planning wasn’t a straight line. I spent a year volunteering in a school in Kenya, then started work in a psychiatric hospital laundry. That early mix of service and shop-floor reality kept me grounded.
I moved into finance in the NHS as a Management Accountant and helped implement early mainframe systems, which sparked my interest in change and delivery. Later I led technology and operations teams, with P&L accountability, major commercial deals, and international scaling, including building an EMEA division.
In banking (RBS/NatWest) I shifted into strategic workforce management, focused on matching workforce supply to technology demand, improving vendor economics, accelerating onboarding, and delivering savings while redeploying people at risk, including during COVID.
I’ve since led workforce planning in a global enterprise and advised through a workforce analytics business, reinforcing a simple belief: tools help, but an operating model turns insight into decisions.
Today I help organisations make whole-workforce SWP work in practice, across talent acquisition, learning, procurement, finance and transformation. I’m a speaker, a member of the Workforce Planning Institute Global Standards Committee, and the author of The Strategic Workforce Planning Handbook (2026)
the practitioner voice
Passionate & Forthright
I'm polite, but I don’t hide behind polite ambiguity. I'm comfortable saying what won’t work, and I frame SWP in commercial, decision-led terms that can stand up to a CFO or COO.
Practical & Grounded
I drag ideas back to real life: My life experiences, my failures, my occasional low moods, my fundamental belief in people, they all take me towards the real world and away from theory.
Original & Inventive
I'm always seeking new ways to land the message: unconventional metaphors, frameworks, “operating system” thinking, and a willingness to describe SWP so people can actually use it.
my passion and my mission
I believe the workforce in general and people in particular to be an organization's greatest asset and the key to its successful stewardship. SWP, as part of a broader strategic workforce management ecosystem, can maximise the value in that asset.
My mission is to demistify SWP, make it simple to understand and practical to deliver and to bring those messages to the broadest possible global audience.