In April of 2019, one of the members of the Emprata team was conducting research related to the 2018 Occupational Employment Statistics data that had been recently posted on the Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) section of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) website, and he noticed that the 2018 data was also accompanied by an “OES Mapping Tool”.
He was immediately intrigued by the idea of a tool that has the potential to help make a significant positive impact on the lives of individuals who are interested in using employment data to inform their employment decisions. However, he was a bit disappointed to find that the OES Mapping Tool uses static maps to serve the data, where the only way to zoom in or out on the map is to use the browser itself, making it a much more cumbersome task for the user to explore any of the metropolitan data.
The Solution: A Job Explorer Map
Design
One of Emprata’s primary areas of expertise is the visualization of geographic data, so we enjoy learning about how others approach the challenge of mapping public datasets. In the case of this visualization, a few of our team members were particularly interested in discussing not what was wrong with this map, but instead who would this map be wrong for, and conversely, who would appreciate this tool the most. This focus on potential use cases continued, and this led to a conversation about how to truly serve the needs of the users. In the end, the group agreed that it could be interesting to avoid the temptation to create a tool that offers an open playing field of flexibility and features in an attempt to appeal to all users, and instead start with some specific users in mind and then aim to design the tool so that it will help guide these users to where they need to be.
Potential Applications
We are hoping that this tool will be used in ways that we never could have imagined, but we also felt that it would be helpful for us to share some different uses for this tool that we kept in mind as we designed and developed it:
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“I don’t know what I want to do”
- I want to skim through a lot of different job options very quickly so that I can get a general sense of how many actual positions are out there for a lot of different jobs that I might be interested in
- I want to look up my dream job to find the places where I am most likely (and least likely) to find this job
- I don’t need to find my dream job, but I would like to go through a list of jobs one-by-one, stopping at anything interesting in order to find out more about the job’s relative availability, approximate salary, and growth trend
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“I’m only interested in one location”
- I want to focus very specifically on my current location and skim through jobs quickly to find ones that may have particularly high availability (but also checking the trend since last year)
- I know exactly where I want to move, and I know exactly what I want to do, but I still want to see if there are any nearby areas that might be even better to look into
- I want to know if there were any jobs in my field, within in my area, that increased greatly in availability over the past year
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“I have a very specific job in mind and am looking at locations”
- I already have a specific job, and I’m curious to see if there are any other areas that might be interesting from the point of view of job availability and salary
- I want to go to college to eventually work in a specific field, but I want to make sure that I pick a college where that field is well-represented so that I can apply to several different internship positions
- I’m negotiating my salary for a new job in a new city, and I want to make use of not only the salary data but also the measures of job availability so that I can make an informed comparison between the jobs when discussing salary
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“I’m thinking about switching jobs within the same field”
- I would like to stay in my field but find a slightly more advanced and better-paying job, and I’m open to moving, so I want to be able to search for other areas that would most likely have a higher job availability and higher salary offer
- I would like to quickly see how the employment numbers for the different jobs in my field have changed since last year because I want to advance my career in the right direction
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