August 14, 2019 by Remie Verougstraete
Emsi is thrilled to announce the addition of historical wage data to our core labor market datasets! With this update, Analyst, Developer, and Talent Analyst users can now compare occupation wage data as far back as 2005.
This new data enables users to track trends in wage growth or decline over time. Combined with the historical employment counts already included in Analyst, Developer, and Talent Analyst, this information gives a more complete look at the growth and vitality of occupations across your region.
For example, using the Occupation Table, we can pull earnings and jobs data for web developers in Seattle, WA….
….and then export the table to Excel where we can create a chart showing how wage changes have correlated with employment change over time.
Now we can see that, despite job counts for web developers more than doubling in the past 10 years, nominal (not adjusted for inflation) wages have experienced only a modest increase. This suggests the ever-growing supply of web developers in Seattle has stayed ahead of or at pace with the local demand.
We could compare this to computer and information research scientists, where we see a clear increase in wages along with a slight decline in the number of jobs over the past 10 years. This suggests that the demand for computer and information research scientists is increasing in Seattle while the labor supply has not kept pace.
Though there are many variables that affect supply and demand, these historical job and wage changes are a great way to begin understanding the nuances of local job trends.
As the above example demonstrates, historical trends put current wage data in context and provide valuable perspective for decision makers. We’ve added this capability to deliver additional insight for:
Historical wage data is available in the “Occupation Table” and “Occupations by Location” reports in Analyst:
Historical wage data is available in the “Occupation Table” and “Occupation Map” reports in Developer:
Historical wage data is available in the “Map Occupations” report in Talent Analyst:
During report set up, simply add the relevant data points for the years you’re interested in using the Custom Data Selection option.
Once you’ve run your report, you can always return to the custom data selection screen by clicking the Add/Remove Columns button:
This update reflects Emsi’s practice of investing heavily in the data we deliver to our users. By integrating multiple sources and applying proprietary methodologies, we strive to enhance the reliability and usability of labor market information so it best serves our clients at the point of decision. In this case, our data engineering team spent many months working to overcome the challenges involved in creating a reliable time series from Occupational Employment Statistics wage data. This included carefully addressing each of the cautions outlined by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. To read more about the work that went into producing this new data, check out the overview article in our Knowledge Base or read the full methodology description.
Learn more about Analyst for higher education, Talent Analyst for enterprise and staffing, and Developer for economic and workforce developers. Please fill out this form if you have any questions! We’d love to connect.