A Solvable Model of Hierarchical Workforces Employed by the Canadian Armed Forces

摘要

An important aspect of workforce planning is to determine the appropriate number of positions at each rank within an institution. Ideally, the workforce structure should support the career progression of workforce members while also ensuring vacancies can be filled through promotion. This paper presents a mathematical formulation and exact analytical solution of the Occupational Structure Sustainability Model that has been employed by the Canadian Armed Forces to investigate healthy rank structures for its military occupations. It is a descriptive model that determines the equilibrium of the workforce population as a function of the attrition, intake and promotion rates at each rank. This allows the model user to solve for any of these parameters if the others are fixed. The model also calculates diagnostics of the workforce related to experience, such as average time in rank before promotion, which help decision makers identify a healthy structure for the occupation. It can be applied to any hierarchical organization in which promotion occurs sequentially upward.