The Physics Manpower Panel is an ad hoc committee of the American Physical Society charged with describing long‐term trends in the supply and demand for doctoral physicists, discerning potential improvements which should be made in their training, and recommending appropriate actions to the APS Council. This paper introduces the studies being performed concerning career paths and supply and demand, which are detailed in the following four papers. It also describes briefly the current status of work on regional academia‐industry conferences, quality indicators for graduate physics education.