The vocational education and training (VET) sector seeks to teach courses that will meet the future demands from employers in terms of the quantity and types of skills required. This report, which is part of the larger consortium program, "A well-skilled future: Tailoring VET to the emerging labour market," examines how the VET sector might anticipate what the future needs of employers might be and describes the difficulty of projecting the evolution of the economy. It offers an initial evaluation of the accuracy of the principal model used for skills forecasting in Australia (the MONASH model) and concludes with a discussion of how best to manage the uncertainty over the shape of future skills demand. A list of skills consortium publications is appended. (Contains 4 tables and 9 figures.) [This work has been produced with funding provided through the Australian Department of Education, Science and Training. The author/project team was funded to undertake this research via a grant under the National Vocational Education and Training Research and Evaluation (NVETRE) Program.]