A concept used in developing statistics on the size of a work force. The idea is to express a work force made up of both full- and part-time employees as the number of workers that would be employed if all were full time. It is computed by dividing the total hours worked by all employees in a given time period by the number of work hours in the time period. Thus an FTE would be, for example, one person working a normal work week, two people working half time, and so on.