Week 3 — Overall Study Guide

Week 3 pairs two chapters that move in the same direction: first understand the work, then plan the workforce around it. Chapter 9 gives you the vocabulary and methods for analyzing jobs and work — what a job actually requires in terms of tasks and worker attributes (KSAOs: knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics). Chapter 10 zooms out to the organizational level and lays out strategic workforce planning (SWP), the process by which an organization anticipates its future talent needs and builds the plan to meet them. The Canvas Overview page frames the shift bluntly: employees no longer stay with one employer until retirement, globalization has intensified competition for talent, and organizations now depend on deliberate workforce planning — not loyalty or tenure — to build a competitive advantage.

The week also introduces a personal dimension that carries through several deliverables: personality. Discussion Forum 1 has you take the Big Five personality assessment and connect your own traits to career fit and hiring decisions. The journal asks you to take a separate Emotional Intelligence quiz and reflect on how EI shapes decision-making under pressure. Both self-assessments are completed on third-party websites, not inside Canvas, so budget time to actually take them before you write anything.

Overview Table of Deliverables

The table below reproduces the Week 3 Overview page's deliverable table exactly. Four assessments carry weight this week, totaling 14% of the course grade — the heaviest single item is the Strategic Workforce Planning Process assignment at 7%.

The Canvas Overview page lists two Weekly Learning Outcomes (WLOs) this week — fewer than Week 1's three, but each spans multiple deliverables. They are reproduced verbatim below, each followed by a note on what it actually requires of you and where in the week it is assessed.

Read the two outcomes as complementary lenses on the same problem. WLO 1 is about the person — what personality and emotional intelligence reveal about fit, self-awareness, and career direction. WLO 2 is about the system — how an organization plans, forecasts, and executes workforce decisions at scale. The Strategic Workforce Planning Process assignment is the one deliverable that pulls both lenses together, since it asks you to evaluate real companies' hiring practices against both discrimination risk and strategic workforce planning quality.

The required text remains Cascio, W. F., & Aguinis, H. (2019). Applied Psychology in Talent Management (8th ed.). SAGE Publications, in the Ebook Central database. Week 3 assigns two chapters.

For a full walk-through of each chapter's frameworks, key terms, and closing questions, see the dedicated Chapter 9 and Chapter 10 deep-dive study guides on this site — this overview does not repeat that material, only where it lands in the week's work.

Articles, a Book, and Two Self-Assessments

Beyond the two textbook chapters, the Resources page names a supplemental book chapter, six articles, and two self-assessment tools that anchor the week's discussion, journal, and assignment work.

• Sripada, C. (Ed.). (2020). Leading Human Capital in the 2020s: Emerging Perspectives (chapters on "Leading Digital Transformation in Traditional Organizations" and "Workforce Cap-Agility"). SAGE. Explains organizational agility and how to align it with labor productivity; assists The Strategic Workforce Planning Process assignment.
• Altman, R. (2020). "Moving the needle" with limited resources. International Association for Human Resource Information Management. Covers how COVID-19 affected HR technology investment; assists the assignment.
• Davis, J. (2022, January 19). How to win the talent war. Talent Acquisition Excellence. Covers acquiring and retaining talented employees, interview questions, and the cost of losing employees; assists Discussion Forum 2 and the assignment.
• Lim, A. (2025, March 20). Big five personality traits: The 5-factor model of personality. Simply Psychology. Explains the Big Five dimensions and factors; assists Discussion Forum 1.
• Nayeem, M. A., & Faheem, H. (2021). IKEA's talent management and corporate culture. IUP Journal of Organizational Behavior, 20(4), 482–501. Describes IKEA hiring on values and beliefs rather than skills or experience alone, and its corporate culture; assists Discussion Forum 1.
• Tedrick, S. (2023). Using innovation principles to improve DEIB outcomes. Leadership Excellence, 40(4), 31–33. Covers executives falling short on DEIB compliance and how to bring innovation to DEIB initiatives; assists the assignment.
• Zielinski, D. (2020). What does the tech revolution mean for HR? HR Magazine, 65(4), 78–79. Covers HR's underuse of available technology platforms, backed by a cross-firm survey; assists Discussion Forum 2.
• Last Eight Percent. (n.d.). Emotional intelligence quiz. IHHP. A self-assessment quiz used for the Journal.
• My Personality Test. (n.d.). Big 5 test. A self-assessment quiz used for Discussion Forum 1.

Chapter 9 defines work analysis as any systematic process for gathering, documenting, and analyzing three features of work: its content (tasks, responsibilities, outputs), the worker attributes needed to perform it (KSAOs — knowledge, skills, abilities, and other personal characteristics), and the context in which the work happens. The chapter distinguishes work-oriented approaches (what gets done) from worker-oriented approaches (how it gets done, including personality, values, and attitudes), and introduces competency modeling as an approach that draws on the full range of KSAOs. It also covers personality-based job analysis (PBJA) — useful for cross-functional, difficult-to-define work that resists a simple task list — and job specifications, the KSAOs judged necessary to do a given job.

Chapter 10 lays out strategic workforce planning (SWP) as a four-component, integrated system rather than a set of unrelated HR activities: a talent inventory (an organized database of current employees' skills, abilities, career interests, and experience), forecasts of workforce supply and demand, action plans to close the gaps those forecasts reveal, and control and evaluation procedures to check whether the plan worked. The chapter ties SWP tightly to business strategy — workforce plans exist to serve business plans, not the reverse — and devotes substantial attention to leadership succession, using 3M's succession practices as a worked example of a company that treats leadership continuity as a deliberate, CEO-driven process rather than an emergency response.

Week 3 has four graded deliverables, each with a dedicated study guide that takes the prompt apart in full. The summaries below orient you and point you to the right companion document.

6.1 Discussion Forum 1 — Personality in Workforce Planning

Tagged to WLO 1 and CLO 2, worth 3%, due Day 3. Before posting, review Chapter 9, the IKEA article, and complete the Big 5 Test, then compare your results against the Simply Psychology Big Five article. Your initial post addresses whether the survey felt accurate, discusses each of your personality dimensions, states what careers the test surfaced, evaluates whether those suggested careers fit you, and explains how an employer might use the questionnaire to hire the right people. The initial post runs 200 words minimum, due Day 3; two peer replies of 100+ words each are due by Day 7. See the Week 3 Discussion Forum 1 Study Guide.

6.2 Discussion Forum 2 — Strategic Workforce Planning

Tagged to WLO 2 and CLOs 2 and 3, worth 3%. Before posting, review Chapter 10, the Davis "How to Win the Talent War" article, and the Zielinski tech-revolution article. You take the role of a VP of talent acquisition at a midsize U.S. organization, forecasting the next 12 months of hiring needs. Using Chapter 10's four SWP components, you explain how you would anticipate needs, set priorities, and allocate scarce resources, weigh contractors against in-house hires, and identify which arrangement returns the most value for the resource invested. The initial post runs 200 words minimum, due Day 3; two peer replies of 100+ words each are due by Day 7. See the Week 3 Discussion Forum 2 Study Guide.

6.3 Journal — Emotional Intelligence (EI) Self-Reflection

Tagged to WLO 1 and CLOs 1 and 3, worth 1%, due Day 7. Before writing, take the Emotional Intelligence Quiz on the IHHP site — a multiple-choice, third-party self-assessment. In at least 300 words, written in the first person, you discuss how emotional intelligence affects the ability to handle difficult situations and analyze how a deeper understanding of your own EI leads to stronger decision-making, weaving your quiz results into the reflection. See the Week 3 Journal Study Guide.

6.4 Assignment — The Strategic Workforce Planning Process

Tagged to WLO 1 and CLO 2, worth 7%, due Day 7. A 3–4 page APA paper analyzing the hiring practices of Abercrombie & Fitch and Hooters, both of which have faced court cases tied to hiring and non-hiring decisions. You identify at least one court case for each company, discuss each case's outcome, reflect on whether each company's strategic workforce planning process properly accounted for discrimination risk, and then identify a different company whose SWP process made it demonstrably stronger, with supporting facts and rationale. The paper requires at least two scholarly or credible sources beyond the course text. See the Week 3 Assignment Study Guide.

BUS 623 builds from foundational concepts (Weeks 1–2) toward applied, workplace-facing skill. Week 3 marks the shift from law and general applied-psychology concepts into the operational core of talent management: understanding what a job requires (Chapter 9) and planning the workforce strategically around that understanding (Chapter 10). The personality and emotional-intelligence self-assessments this week are not detours — they model the worker-oriented, KSAO-based analysis Chapter 9 describes, applied to yourself before you apply it to a hiring scenario.

The vocabulary introduced this week — KSAOs, competency modeling, the four SWP components, talent inventory, and succession planning — recurs in later weeks whenever the course turns to recruitment, selection, and performance management, all of which assume a workforce plan already exists. Treat Chapter 10's four-component framework in particular as a reference model you will keep reaching for, not a one-week topic to clear and forget.