The Relationship Between Labour Market Core Skills Requirements And University Graduate Soft Skills Competence
[A CASE STUDY OF NORTH-WEST, NIGERIA]

2.    Organisational Decisions: Human resource planning needs to take into account the rest of the organisation’s strategic plans, sales and production forecasts and new ventures to be more accurate because it operates as an open system. Estimating changes, for example, in product or service demand is a basic forecasting concern, as is anticipating changes in national or regional economics. This enables the planning expert to forecast the requisite production schedules and thereby estimate whether any extra workforce is needed in future. Where plans are changed, the effect of the changes must be estimated. Proposed expansion, contraction or diversification of the organisation’s activities will obviously affect the demand for labour in general or for particular skills. This may be estimated by market research, competitive analysis, trends in technological advances and so on.
3.    Workforce factors: Demand is not only influenced by the external and organisational factors but also by the internal in and out fluxes of the employees through retirements, terminations, resignations, deaths and leaves of absence, etc. These actions by employees become Lowly predictable, once you spend more and more time with the organisation or a certain industry. These determine how much labour will be required, given the expected productivity or work rate of different types of employee and the expected volume of business activity. Therefore, the cost of existing labour such as overtime, training, benefits and so on will put a financial constraint on the organisation’s manpower levels.
However, labour demand forecasting include the use of both quantitative and qualitative approaches. These approaches serve to complement each other and provide a more complete forecast by integrating the contributions of both theoreticians and practitioners.
Qualitative Approach: In this approach, forecasting is less statistical. It is based on the interests, abilities, and aspirations of individual employees with the current and future staffing needs of an organisation. Experts of this approach forecasts to anticipate staffing requirements estimating the future human resource requirements, their experiences and judgments to good effect. Some of the techniques in this approach are presented in figure 3 as follows: