An integration model for manpower forecasting

Manpower forecasting has made significant contributions to human resource management. Due to difficulties in collecting the required data for making appropriate analysis, most studies in the literature concentrate on forecasts of individual firms. This paper presents a regression model which utilizes the data of large firms to draw inferences to the demands of other firms. More specifically, a regression model showing the negative relationship between the rank of a firm and its associated demand is fitted to the data of a number of large manufacturing firms. The area under the regression line delineated by the y-axis and the x-axis is then an estimate of the total demand of the whole industry. Confidence intervals for the estimate can also be constructed. As an illustration, the demand for the industrial management manpower in Taiwan is forecasted by applying the proposed model.