A Method of Estimating Craft Manpower Requirements at Industry Level

Accurate estimation of future craft manpower requirements is essential to an industry if shortage of manpower on the one hand and unemployment on the other are to be avoided. Such estimation should allow for the fact that there is a range of likely outcomes, should permit modification with the passage of time and should be objective.This article proposes a method, based on studies of the printing industry, of obtaining a probabilistic forecast of future manpower requirements by treating changes in individual technical and economic factors as random variables and combining them in a statistical model. The implications of this are then examined for various policies, using a cost utility model and calculations of the expected value of unemployment resulting from different levels of recruitment.