Benchmarking Forecasters' Background

BENCHMARKING FORECASTERS’ BACKGROUND By Chaman L. Jain, St. John’s University Whenever a company looks for a person to hire, it specifies qualifications and responsibilities. Hiring a person for the position of forecasting is no different. Since forecasting is a fairly young function, companies that are starting out this function for the first time may want to know what kind of background they should be looking for in a forecaster. The survey results provide an answer. OVERALL BACKGROUND OF FORECASTERS The background of a forecaster can be categorized into two: (1) Academic and (2) Business. To get a handle on the academic background, we asked participants to check any one or more of the six majors: (i) Business, (ii) Engineering, (iii) Liberal Arts, (iv) Medical, (v) Sciences and (vi) Others. What was not covered by the first five was lumped under ‘Others.’ The survey shows that most of the practicing forecasters (51.01%) majored in business. Then comes engineering (14.77%) and sciences (13.42%). (See Figure 1) This may be because people majored in engineering and sciences are generally very good in math/statistics, which is very important in forecasting. To find ...