There is a version of workforce planning that happens inside most project organisations. It starts when the schedule is set, works backward from the mobilisation date, and lands in a recruiter’s inbox about three months before people are needed on the ground. For straightforward roles in a stable labour market, it is sometimes enough. For technical roles on complex energy projects in 2026, it almost never is.

The gap between when projects start sourcing people and when they actually need them has been widening for years. Skills shortages, tighter pre-employment screening requirements, longer mobilisation lead times and the growing complexity of engagement structures have all pushed the required planning horizon further back. Projects that treat workforce planning as an execution-phase activity are consistently the ones that find themselves short-staffed at the wrong moment.

This is not a critique of project teams. It is a structural problem that the industry has been slow to address. And with Australia’s oil and gas sector running several major projects simultaneously, the consequences of late workforce planning are more visible and more costly than they have been for a long time.

What the Labour Market Actually Looks Like Right Now

The competition for experienced field technicians, commissioning engineers and specialist operators in Australia is not a future scenario. It is the present reality.

Scarborough is transitioning from construction into commissioning. Barossa is ramping up operations in the NT. Browse pre-FID work is drawing on specialist profiles. The North West Shelf life extension program is sustaining ongoing operational and brownfield workforce demand. And that is before factoring in the pipeline of shutdowns and turnarounds that run continuously across WA’s operational facilities.

In a market like this, the assumption that qualified candidates will be available when a project needs them is a gamble rather than a plan. The people with the specific experience that major projects require, LNG commissioning backgrounds, FPSO operational experience, subsea intervention capability, are being approached by multiple employers at once. The projects that secure them are not necessarily the ones offering the highest rates. They are the ones that engaged earliest and made the process of coming on board straightforward.

Where Workforce Planning Actually Needs to Start

For a project with a first production target in 2028 or 2029, meaningful workforce planning needs to begin in 2026. Not as a detailed headcount model with fixed numbers, but as a considered view of the skills required at each phase of the project lifecycle and the lead times associated with sourcing them.

Some of the questions that should be on the table at this stage include:

• Which roles are genuinely scarce in the current market, and how long does it realistically take to find and verify a suitable candidate?
• Which engagement structures, employee, contractor, ABN, do different roles require, and are the internal systems in place to manage them?
• Where are the single points of failure in the planned workforce, roles where one departure would create a serious operational problem?
• What does the onboarding and mobilisation process look like, and are there bottlenecks that can be addressed before they become urgent?
• Which specialist profiles might be available now from projects winding down, and is there value in engaging them early even if the project is not yet at that phase?

These are not questions that require a fixed workforce plan to answer. They require a strategic conversation between the project team and a workforce partner who understands the market, the engagement structures and the specific technical requirements involved.

The Cost of Getting This Wrong

Late workforce planning has costs that project budgets often do not capture in advance but always feel after the fact.

Schedule slippage is the most obvious. A commissioning phase delayed because a critical specialist could not be mobilised in time has a direct cost measured in daily facility operating expenditure, lost production and contract penalty exposure. Those figures are rarely small on a major offshore project.

Quality compromise is less visible but equally damaging. When the preferred candidate is not available and the timeline is already tight, the temptation is to lower the bar rather than extend the search. An under-qualified person in a specialist role on a complex project creates risk that is difficult to quantify until something goes wrong.

Contractor disruption is an underappreciated risk on long-duration projects. When workers feel like they were sourced in a rush, onboarded poorly and managed inconsistently, retention suffers. Replacing an experienced contractor mid-project is significantly more expensive than retaining the original person, and the disruption to team cohesion and institutional knowledge is real.

What a Better Approach Looks Like

The most effective workforce strategies on complex projects share a few common characteristics.

They start with the specialist roles and work outward. Rather than trying to plan the entire workforce simultaneously, the best project teams identify the roles that are hardest to fill and longest to onboard first. Those roles get the earliest attention, the most thorough screening and the most careful engagement management.

They treat the workforce partner as part of the project team rather than a service vendor. A recruiter who understands the project, has reviewed the scope, knows the site conditions and has met the project leadership can have a materially different conversation with a candidate than one working from a job description alone.

They build flexibility into the engagement structure from the start. Projects evolve. Timelines shift. Scope changes. A workforce strategy that assumes everything will go to plan is already behind. Building in the ability to adjust engagement structures, scale up or down at specific phases, and move people between roles as the project requires is part of good planning rather than a contingency.

The Practical Starting Point

For operators and project leads who recognise this problem but are not sure where to begin, the starting point is a conversation rather than a document. A straightforward review of the project’s workforce requirements by phase, the current market availability of the key roles, and the realistic lead times involved takes a few hours and produces a much clearer picture of where the risk sits.

That conversation is worth having now, regardless of how far out the project timeline extends. In the current market, the window for getting ahead of the problem is shorter than most project timelines suggest.