Joyous Pre-School Education has successfully opened its third branch in the eastern side of Singapore. Joyous Pre-School, since its inception 8 years ago, has won numerous awards and accolades in the Early Childhood Education industry. It has gained much recognition among early childhood educators and technology savvy parents with its innovative teaching methods and the use of technological tools and gadgets to teach pre-schoolers. Due to the use of advanced teaching methods with more expensive teaching tools, the operating cost of the 3 pre-school branches are higher than the average pre-school in the market. The teachers recruited in Joyous Pre-School, not only need to have regulated certifications and diplomas in early childhood education, but also require good knowledge of pre-school education software, basic to intermediate coding languages and virtual reality teaching tools. Joyous Pre-School is remunerating its teachers at an above median market salary and benefits package in order to attract the qualified and competent teachers.

Joyous Pre-School currently has 60 teachers with about 300 pre-school students across the 3 branches. The teacher and student ratio has been kept lower than the requirement by the local regulator, Early Childhood Education Agency, so that more attention is provided by the teachers for each student. About 80% of the pioneer group of teachers who joined Joyous Pre-School since inception is still in the teaching force and several are in the management positions of the 3 branches. However, the new hires in the last 3 years have rather low retention rate where more than 60% will leave the job before the end of their second year.

The founder-cum-human resource director of Joyous Pre-School, Lindsey Chua, initially used structured interview and job simulation methods to select and assess the teachers for its first branch. With the rapid need to recruit teachers for its expansion in its second and third branches, Lindsey shortened the selection process with a structured interview and a job knowledge test that comprises testing for teaching pedagogies and the use of technological tools and software. In order to find out the attrition reasons, Lindsey personally conducted exit interviews with the teachers who resigned in the past 6 months.

From the exit interviews, the teachers cited mainly three reasons, namely, long working hours with effects of burnout, difficulty keeping up with the technological knowledge in the use of the teaching tools and lack of career development opportunities. Though these are the common reasons gathered from the exit interviews, the branch managers' feedback indicated that it was mainly the lack of passion in early childhood education and the nurturing love for their young learners. One of the branch managers cited that the job descriptions used for recruitment and interview purpose may need to be reviewed so as to reflect the added job scope of updated knowledge in teaching software and technology tools as well as the need to interact with the parents to provide them with feedback and comments on students' learning progress. The last job analysis was conducted about 4 years ago.

Lindsey reflected if there was a need to introduce a personality instrument to assess the candidates' innate personality that suits an early childhood educator. In addition, she is keen to re-introduce job simulations into the assessment process, where the candidate's job skills and interpersonal interactions with the learners can be observed. Even though the job simulations and additional personality assessment test will lengthen the selection process, Lindsey felt it was worth the additional time in order to recruit teachers who would stay with Joyous Pre-School for sustained periods of time.

Question: Discuss the steps of the workforce planning process that can be applied by Lindsey and her branch managers to support Joyous Pre-School's expansion plan.