GPEC (Forecasting Management of Jobs and Skills) refers to a human resources management method aimed at aligning workforce, jobs, and skills with the strategic needs of a company in the short and medium term. Mandatory for companies with more than 300 employees since the Borloo law of 2005, this approach was complemented by GEPP (Management of Jobs and Professional Pathways) in 2017.
On paper, GPEC structures anticipation. In practice, it generates concrete difficulties that HR teams often absorb without naming them.
Obsolescence of GPEC Frameworks in the Face of Transformation Pace
The legal framework of GEPP provides for a triennial negotiation. Three years is the theoretical time between two updates of agreements. In reality, jobs transform on much shorter cycles. Specialized players like 365Talents note that when the file is reopened three years later, a significant portion of job descriptions no longer has operational relevance.
Competency frameworks then become static documents that do not reflect technological advancements or new field needs. HR finds itself maintaining an administrative tool disconnected from the actual strategy. This gap erodes their credibility with operational managers, who stop consulting outdated mappings.
To delve deeper into this topic, a detailed analysis can be found on the limitations of GPEC on Future au Féminin, which precisely describes this temporal gap effect on human resource management.
GPEC and Top-Down Logic: A Barrier to Employee Engagement
The GPEC approach remains structurally top-down. Management defines strategic directions, the HR department translates these directions into skill needs, and then employees receive a training or mobility plan. In this scheme, the individual aspirations of employees come at the end of the chain.
This functioning poses a concrete problem of buy-in. When an employee discovers that their position is classified as “in tension” or “in decline” without having been consulted on their own professional projects, GPEC becomes anxiety-inducing. The proposed career paths resemble assignments more than chosen trajectories.
Consequences on Talent Retention
The most qualified employees, those that the GPEC approach specifically seeks to retain, are also the most sensitive to this lack of co-construction. A skills management plan perceived as imposed pushes some profiles to seek elsewhere for an employer that values their individual journey.
The GEPP of 2017 attempted to integrate this dimension by adding the notion of “professional pathways.” In practice, many companies simply renamed their GPEC agreement to GEPP agreement without modifying the top-down mechanics.
Hidden Costs of Implementing GPEC for HR Teams
Implementing a GPEC mobilizes considerable resources that management regularly underestimates. The effort is not limited to negotiating the agreement. It requires mapping existing jobs, identifying the skills held by each employee, projecting future needs, measuring gaps, and then designing an action plan.
Each of these steps relies on the collection and updating of data often scattered across multiple tools (HRIS, spreadsheets, annual reviews, job descriptions). HR teams spend an disproportionate amount of time consolidating heterogeneous information before they can even analyze anything.
Complexity of GPEC Tools
Dedicated software for forecasting management of jobs and skills exists, but its deployment adds a layer of complexity. Integration with the existing HRIS, training users, maintaining frameworks: all of this represents an investment in time and budget that SMEs close to the 300-employee threshold find difficult to absorb.
Here are the rarely budgeted cost items in a GPEC project:
- The time spent by managers validating their teams’ skills profiles, often several cumulative days per department
- The continuous updating of job frameworks, which requires ongoing sector monitoring
- Internal training for HR to master forecasting analysis tools and know how to interpret gaps
Limited Regulatory Scope of GPEC: What It Does Not Cover
GPEC focuses on the alignment of skills and jobs. It does not address, or only marginally addresses, the financial dimension of workforce management. Forecasted salary costs, return on investment of training, and the budgetary impact of internal mobility remain outside the standard scope.
This gap forces HR to maintain two parallel approaches: GPEC on one side to anticipate skills, and social management control on the other to manage costs. Coordination between these two approaches generates duplications and gray areas, particularly regarding training.
Training: A Frequent Blind Spot
GPEC identifies skills gaps. It prescribes training as the main lever. It does not provide a framework to evaluate whether a training action has effectively closed the identified gap. HR finds itself financing massive training plans without a reliable indicator of their actual effectiveness on operational skills.
This problem worsens when technological advancements (automation, artificial intelligence) change the required skills faster than training catalogs can be updated. GPEC prescribes training for jobs whose content will have changed before the end of the triennial plan.
Risk of Reducing GPEC to a Legal Exercise
The last disadvantage relates to the very nature of the approach. Because it is a legal obligation, GPEC tends to become a compliance exercise rather than a strategic management tool. Companies negotiate an agreement to comply with the Labor Code, not to transform their talent management.
The symptoms are identifiable:
- The GPEC agreement repeats the same categories of sensitive jobs from one negotiation to another, without real updating
- Monitoring indicators measure the completion of actions (number of trainings delivered) rather than their impact (skills actually acquired)
- Social partners validate a document without field managers having contributed to its development
When GPEC is reduced to producing a compliant agreement, HR dedicates energy to it without deriving any decision-making value. The approach becomes a net cost for the human resources function, with no measurable return on collective performance.
The open question is how to transition from a compliance logic to a usage logic, where skills data genuinely informs daily decisions on recruitment, mobility, and training.