Partnering with the States to Provide Labor Market Information

I am fortunate to have so many opportunities to speak about the Bureau of Labor Statistics and how the information we release—almost daily—helps Americans make smart decisions. Recently, I’ve spoken to academics, students, researchers, business leaders, labor officials, policymakers, and more. No matter the group, I’m often asked what data we have for a specific state or local area. While people care about national trends—the current (February 2016) national unemployment rate of 4.9 percent is the lowest rate since November 2007—they also want to know what’s happening closer to home. People in Iowa want to know their unemployment rate, 3.5 percent in January 2016, just as people in Mississippi want to know their unemployment rate, 6.7 percent.

I hope all users of BLS data appreciate that BLS is able to produce much of our national, state, and local data because of our partnerships with the states.

BLS and our state partners work together to publish comparable data in two broad subject areas: the labor market (employment, hours, and earnings) and occupational safety and health (workplace injuries, illnesses, and fatalities). I emphasized “comparable” in the previous sentence because we must be sure we measure conditions well and in the same way across localities. Otherwise, it’s hard to know how your area stacks up—in either level or trend.

Today I will focus on our Labor Market Information (LMI) programs, the first of which started over a century ago to collect employment, hours, and earnings for states and metro areas in 1915.

Four BLS programs make up the LMI family:

  • The Current Employment Statistics program provides the very timely monthly report on payroll jobs for the nation by detailed industry. It also provides employment data for states and metropolitan areas. Did you know California gained 442,400 jobs from January 2015 to January 2016? That was more jobs than any other state, but seven states had larger percentage gains. Idaho had the largest percentage increase, 3.7 percent, compared with 2.8 percent in California.
  • The Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages is a complete count of all employers who file Unemployment Insurance reports with their states. This program provides our most detailed geographic breakdowns, with information down to the county level. Cuyahoga County, Ohio, where I used to live, had 713,000 wage and salary workers in the third quarter of 2015, and their average weekly wage was $985.
  • The Occupational Employment Statistics program provides employment and wage information for detailed occupations. The program provides data for the nation, states, metropolitan areas, and other geographic groupings. From this program, we learn that accountants and auditors in Boise earned an average of $31.21 per hour in 2014; the national average for accountants and auditors was $35.42 per hour.
  • The Local Area Unemployment Statistics program provides unemployment data for states and local areas. Interestingly, both North and South Dakota had 2.8 percent unemployment rates in January 2016, the lowest in the nation.

state-unemployment-rates-in-january-2016

BLS and the states work together to decide what information we and our customers in the public and private sector need to learn about the labor market. Together we decide the best methods for collecting accurate, relevant information at a cost that provides the best value for taxpayers. BLS and the states collaborate on collecting the data, ensuring its accuracy, and publishing it quickly enough for public policymakers, businesses, and families to make good decisions.

Our partnerships with the states foster a culture of continuous improvement, as we test new ideas and methods to deepen our knowledge of the labor market. We strengthened this partnership through the Workforce Investment Act of 1998 and more recently the Workforce Innovation and Opportunity Act of 2014. Working together, we strive to produce and improve labor market information that serves the needs of local communities across the country.

 

Topics: Earnings and Wages | Employment | Geographic Information | Industries | Occupations | Survey Respondents | Unemployment | Workplace Injuries and Illnesses
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Thinking About a New Job? Try Healthcare

Editor’s note: The following has been cross-posted from the U.S. Department of Labor blog. The writer is Michael Wolf, chief of the Division of Occupational Employment Projections at BLS.

Healthcare jobs have a bright outlook. In fact, about 1 in every 4 new jobs added to the economy between 2014 and 2024 will be in healthcare fields, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics projections.

health-care-1-in-4

What’s behind this wave of growth? A couple of factors: The baby boom generation is aging and people are living longer, so there will be more older people who need healthcare services to remain healthy and active. Also, rates of chronic conditions like diabetes and obesity are growing, so more healthcare workers will be needed to help care for people with conditions like these. And because more people have health insurance due to federal health insurance reform, they’re also more likely to use healthcare services, increasing the demand for many kinds of healthcare workers.

health-care-growth

Healthcare job opportunities are found across all education levels—from graduate degrees to just a high school diploma. However, wages are typically higher for those that need more education.

health-care-wages-2

Explore these jobs and many more using the online Occupational Outlook Handbook at www.bls.gov/ooh. Need help finding a job or changing careers? Visit your local American Job Center or explore our online resources.

Topics: Career Outlook | Earnings and Wages | Educational Attainment | Employment Projections | Occupational Outlook Handbook
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Why This Counts: Measuring “Gig” Work

With so much chatter about the emerging “gig” economy, you may wonder if BLS has a stat for that. While our regular measures of labor market activity probably reflect a lot of “gig” work, we can’t currently break this work out separately. To do that, we need to repeat a survey specially designed to measure contingent and alternative work arrangements. Fortunately, BLS has conducted such surveys in the past, and I am very happy to say that we will do it again in 2017.

If you follow our monthly and quarterly employment reports, you know we publish lots of information not just on the number of jobs gained or lost but on the characteristics of jobs and workers. What industries or occupations are growing or shrinking? What are the employment trends for states, counties, or metro areas? How many people work part time, either by choice or because they prefer a full-time job but can only find part-time work? How many people are self-employed? How many people have more than one job? These are just some of the questions we can answer regularly with our employment reports. Other questions are harder to answer.

Many people want to know about workers whose jobs are temporary or irregular or not expected to last. So what kinds of jobs are those? You may be familiar with services where drivers use their own cars to take people where they want to go. Customers who need a ride use a computer or mobile app to request a pickup. If a driver agrees to provide a ride, a third party electronically receives the payment from the rider and pays the driver. Other examples of workers we want to know more about are people who sign up online to perform tasks for pay when it is convenient for them.

While many of these short-term jobs are new, similar jobs have been around a long time in the U.S. economy: substitute teachers, truck drivers, freelance journalist, day laborers in agriculture or construction, on-call equipment movers, actors, and photographers. These jobs are often short term, and many people in these occupations now go online to match up with potential employers. Some people call jobs like these “gigs,” much like the Saturday night gigs your high school garage band played. At BLS we call these contingent or alternative employment arrangements. What do we mean by those terms? Contingent workers do not expect their jobs to last, or their jobs are temporary. Workers with alternative employment arrangements include independent contractors, on-call workers, or people who work through temporary help agencies or contract firms.

Not to brag about being ahead of the curve, but we first examined workers like these in a 1995 survey. We conducted similar surveys in 1997, 1999, 2001, and 2005. Sadly, we haven’t had funding to conduct the survey about contingent and alternative work arrangements since 2005. However, I am delighted the U.S. Department of Labor is funding a one-time update to the survey in May 2017.

BLS will conduct the survey on contingent and alternative employment as part of the May 2017 Current Population Survey. That’s the monthly survey from which we measure the unemployment rate and other important labor market indicators. The questions will identify workers with contingent or alternative work arrangements; measure workers’ satisfaction with their current arrangement; and measure earnings, health insurance coverage, and eligibility for employer-provided retirement plans. To be able to compare today’s economy with results from previous surveys, most of the questions will be the same as they were in earlier surveys. We also will explore whether we need to add questions to reflect changes in work arrangements since the 2005 survey.

To keep this information coming in the future, the 2017 President’s budget requests funds for BLS to permanently conduct one supplement to the Current Population Survey each year. If Congress approves this funding, we would ask the questions on contingent and alternative work arrangements every 2 years, with questions on other important topics in the alternating years.

We have a lot of work to get ready for the survey next year, but I’m very excited that all of us will soon have these measures again after so many years without them.

Topics: Benefits and Compensation | Earnings and Wages | Employment | Labor Force Characteristics | Occupations | Why This Counts
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Worth a Thousand Words? Announcing Ready-to-Go Interactive Graphics with BLS News Releases

Last spring I wrote about how we’ve been using more and better charts and maps to help you understand our statistics. Today I’m excited to tell you about a new set of graphical tools to make our news releases more illuminating at the moment of their posting.

We want everyone to be able to “see” quickly what’s in the hundreds of news releases we publish every year—on price trends, pay and benefits, productivity, employment and unemployment, job openings and labor turnover, and other topics. The format of these news releases still typically includes a few pages of text to explain the latest information about a topic. Most releases also include tables with lots and lots of numbers. These news releases have served our customers well for decades, but we’re always looking for ways to improve our products and services. Many of you have told us that adding charts and maps to our news releases would make them more useful and easier to understand. In recent years we’ve added charts and maps to many news releases, but most releases only include a couple of these visualizations. We are committed to do more.

We’re adding a cool new feature to many of our releases. Starting last fall, we began posting sets of interactive graphics to complement some of our most widely read economic reports. We’ll update these graphics with each new release of data. Our monthly news release on import and export price indexes was the first to have a set of interactive graphics. The quarterly Employment Cost Index news release was the next to include interactive graphics. Most recently, when we published the Employment Situation—often our most watched news release—on January 8, we presented a lengthy new set of charts from our monthly surveys of households and nonfarm establishments. Over the coming months, we will add chart sets for more releases.

I’ve used the word “interactive” to describe these charts. Let me explain what that means. Interactive features let you choose what you want to see. For example, our chart showing nonfarm employment levels over the last 20 years starts out with two lines, one for total nonfarm employment and the other for total private employment. The legend above the chart lets you turn categories on or off, simply by clicking on the industry titles in the legend. If you want to look at, say, the last 10 years instead of the last 20, you can change the time period by clicking and dragging within the chart. If you hover your pointer over the lines in the chart, you can see the exact values for individual months.

industry-employment

In the coming months we will continue to develop interactive graphics for the rest of our most watched monthly and quarterly news releases. Our goal over the next few years is to have interactive graphics to accompany all or nearly all of our news releases. I am thrilled to have this great set of tools to serve our customers better.

Take a look. I know you’ll agree with me that the BLS staff have done a fine job crafting these ready-to-go visualizations. Whatever BLS statistics you follow, I hope you find many uses for them and send us a lot of comments and suggestions!

 

 

Topics: Benefits and Compensation | Earnings and Wages | Employment | Industries | Inflation and Prices | Job Openings, Hires, and Separations | Labor Force Characteristics | Productivity | Unemployment
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How People Use the Occupational Outlook Handbook to Search for Careers

BLS released our 2016–17 edition of the Occupational Outlook Handbook on December 17. It is one of the nation’s most widely used sources of career information. It provides details on hundreds of occupations and is used by career counselors, students, parents, teachers, jobseekers, career changers, education and training officials, and researchers. I have asked guest bloggers from the National Association for College Admission Counseling to share how they and their members use this popular resource.

For Gail Grand’s students, the college search process is about more than just picking a campus.

Teens complete an aptitude and interest test and explore careers before ever submitting applications. The strategy is a smart one. Fewer than four in 10 college students graduate in four years, federal data show. And as tuition rates continue to grow, extra years in school can often mean additional debt.

OOH-blog

Tapping into resources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Occupational Outlook Handbook (OOH) helps teens make wise college choices, said Grand, an independent college counselor based in California’s Westlake Village. It also increases students’ likelihood of graduating on time, she noted.

An updated version of the OOH—an online resource that includes hundreds of occupations—was released today.

“It’s a great jumping off point,” said Grand, a member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC). “I use it to go more in depth with students. We look at what the career entails, and which fields really appeal to them.”

Every OOH occupation profile includes on-the-job duties and typical entry-level education requirements. Students can also see if the number of jobs in the profession is projected to grow or shrink over the next decade, and check out the median salary.

When teens have access to the data at the same time that they are making college decisions “they become more informed consumers,” said Dana Ponsky, co-director of college counseling at Bullis School in Potomac, Maryland.

The OOH can also help students learn more about careers they might have otherwise written off. Ponsky, also a NACAC member, recalls counseling a student at her previous school. The teen had completed an online career assessment that showed he would be well-suited as a florist.

“He was very clear about saying: This isn’t me,” Ponsky said.

But by using the OOH, Ponsky was able to get the student to reflect on other occupations that might be of interest.

“I asked him to think about the fact that the flower business in the United States is one of the biggest export/import businesses in world,” she recalled. “That shifted the conversation. He used the handbook to investigate options in international business. Ultimately, that was what he pursued for undergrad.”

Both Ponsky and Grand agree: Not every high school student can (or should) select an occupation prior to college admission.

Nonetheless, OOH and other career exploration resources are an invaluable part of the college application process.

One of the OOH features that Grand finds most helpful is the “More Info” tab, which commonly includes links to professional groups associated with each occupation. She encourages her students to use those resources to pursue mentorships or job shadow opportunities.

“Lots of times kids are going to change majors, but I think when they have an idea of what they want before they go, they’re more likely to finish in four years ” said Grand, who worked as a school-based counselor for 22 years before founding her company, The College Advisor, Inc. “They have a purpose, and they have a passion.”

Topics: Career Outlook | Earnings and Wages | Educational Attainment | Employment | Employment Projections | Occupational Outlook Handbook
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