BU 525 Unit 2 workforce supply projection example

Ninety-Six Technicians Today, About Thirty-Four of Them Still in Place in 2031: A Workforce Supply Projection for a Composite Midwestern Transit Agency

Student Name

Business, Herzing University

BU 525: Strategic Human Capital

Instructor Name

March 9, 2026

Ninety-Six Technicians Today, About Thirty-Four of Them Still in Place in 2031: A Workforce Supply Projection for a Composite Midwestern Transit Agency

The Question and the Method

This projection asks who, of the people the agency employs today in the role groups identified in Unit 1, will still be in those roles at the end of each year to 2031 if the agency does nothing new. Doing nothing means no new hiring into these groups and no training beyond what is already scheduled. The projection is therefore not a forecast of the agency's future workforce; it is the supply that existing people provide, which Unit 3 sets against demand to find the gap that hiring and training must close.

The method is a simple stock-and-flow projection of the kind long used in workforce planning, in which a starting population in each group is reduced each year by flows out at stated rates (Bartholomew et al., 1991). The working is shown so each rate can be challenged. Wright and McMahan (1992) describe the human resource planning tradition within strategic human resource management as an attempt to match the supply of people to the needs a strategy creates; this unit supplies one side of that match, and deliberately keeps it separate from the demand side so neither can be adjusted to fit the other.

The horizon runs to the end of 2031, the end of the board's fleet plan, and the projection is annual because bus deliveries, pension eligibility and the agency's budget all run on yearly cycles. A monthly projection would suggest more precision than the rates can support.

The Starting Position

On January 1, 2026, the composite agency employs 96 bus technicians, 3 of whom completed manufacturer training on the 2024 pilot buses and are qualified for high-voltage work. It employs 6 building electricians, none trained on charging equipment; 4 block schedulers, none trained on the energy module of the scheduling software; and 520 bus operators. The technician group is older than the agency as a whole: 31 of the 96 reach eligibility for an unreduced pension at some point between 2026 and 2031, and 6 of those are already eligible.

Flow Assumptions

Each rate is an assumption for this composite agency, stated with the evidence behind it.

Lateral movement between these groups is close to zero at this agency; technicians rarely become electricians or schedulers. It is therefore omitted, which slightly overstates the precision of the projection.

The Projection

For technicians, the working for 2026 is: 96 at the start, less 6.7 voluntary departures (7 percent), 3 retirements and 2 promotions, leaving 84.3. Each later year starts from the previous year's remainder and applies the same rates, with retirements following the eligibility dates. Fractions are kept because the projection describes expected values, not individuals.

What the Result Is Most Sensitive To

For technicians, two assumptions dominate. If every eligible technician retired on becoming eligible, 31 rather than 22 would leave and about 26 technicians would remain at the end of 2031. If only half retired on eligibility, about 39 would remain. A voluntary departure rate of 5 percent instead of 7 would leave about 41; a rate of 9 percent would leave about 27. Across those cases the remainder falls between roughly 26 and 41, so the conclusion that the agency will retain only a third of today's technicians holds under every reasonable assumption.

For qualified technicians the result barely moves under any assumption, because the starting number is 3. The finding there is not a rate but a fact: the agency begins the transition with almost none of the capability it needs, and the few it has are the most likely to leave.

Hausknecht and Trevor (2011) note that turnover at the level of a group affects performance through the loss of shared experience as well as headcount. A technician workforce that turns over by two thirds in six years will lose much of its knowledge of the agency's diesel fleet at the same time that it needs to learn a new technology, which matters for Unit 4's assessment of which roles are most critical.

What This Projection Does Not Include

The projection excludes people the agency will hire. That is deliberate. Supply here means the existing workforce's contribution, so the gap computed in Unit 3 shows how much hiring and development must provide. It also excludes the effect of the transition itself on turnover. Some technicians may leave rather than learn a new technology, and some may stay longer for the chance to be trained; Unit 6 returns to that question. Operators are projected for completeness, but the agency replaces operators continuously through its existing recruiting, so their gap is about training content rather than numbers.

Finally, the projection treats each group as a single pool. In practice the agency's technicians are split between two garages and three shifts, and a group that looks adequate in total can still leave the night shift at the satellite garage without anyone qualified. That level of detail belongs to the critical-role and metrics work later in the course, where coverage by shift becomes one of the measures the agency watches.

References

Bartholomew, D. J., Forbes, A. F., & McClean, S. I. (1991). Statistical techniques for manpower planning (2nd ed.). Wiley.

Hausknecht, J. P., & Trevor, C. O. (2011). Collective turnover at the group, unit, and organizational levels: Evidence, issues, and implications. Journal of Management, 37(1), 352-388. https://doi.org/10.1177/0149206310383910

Wright, P. M., & McMahan, G. C. (1992). Theoretical perspectives for strategic human resource management. Journal of Management, 18(2), 295-320. https://doi.org/10.1177/014920639201800205