Staffing by Industry: Occupation Sectors

Two the greatest advantages of EMSI’s integrated tools and data are:

(1) We have industry and occupation data both in a single tool (Analyst).

(2) Industry and occupation data types, while usually disconnected, talk to each other easily in EMSI data.

This close connection is due to our “staffing patterns.” Basically, we have each industry mapped to occupations for every region in the US. This means that we can look at an industry like computer systems design services in a county and show that this industry staffs 900 computer software engineers, 300 computer systems analysts, and so on. We can show employment numbers for each occupation staffed by that industry.

Because EMSI’s staffing pattern data are so unique and useful, we wanted to see if we could come up with some creative ways to provide folks with this valuable perspective on employment by industry. In this first table we’ve sorted the all of the occupation sectors to find those with the greatest overall average employment across all industries.

Then we’ve taken the top five here and broken them out further.

Office and administrative support occupations have the highest average percent growth (17.5%), which should be much of a surprise. We would expect this occupation to work in most industries, since all industries employ administrative workers, supervisors, and so on. These occupations find their focus strongly in finance and insurance industries. In that industry sector they make up nearly half of the total employment. Their presence in management of companies and enterprises (28.3%), as well as transportation and warehousing (27.9%), is also very high.

Sales and related occupations is the the next most consistently staffed sector (8.8%). Retail trade shows the greatest percentage presence (55.2%), which is followed by wholesale trade (27.5%) and the real estate sector (23.8%). After that though, the industry falls off pretty sharply. At the bottom of the list, we find the least staffing in industries that sell themselves like health care (0.4%) and educational services (0.3%).

Transportation occupations are predictably focused in the transportation and warehousing industry sector (52.8%), and then in other industries that need to move physical goods from one place to another like wholesale trade (20.7%) and mining (13.4%). Information industries naturally see the smallest presence of these occupation, with finance and insurance showing 0.0%, since they sell nothing that amounts to a physical good, and therefore do not need to transport anything.

Construction occupations show up as very strong percentages of two industry sectors, construction (66.9%), and mining, etc. (45.0%). They then have very small presences throughout the other industry sectors, and virtually no presence in accommodation and food servies (0.0%) and finance and insurance (0.0%).

Management occupations are staffed fairly evenly, but not in particularly high concentrations, which makes sense. They make up 18.0% of management of companies and enterprises, and moderate portions of agriculture, etc. (15.7%), and real estate, etc. (10.0%). Accommodation and food services (2.6%) and retail trade (2.1%) are the two industry sectors that get by with the lowest concentration of management occupations.

This gives us a picture of occupations and industries that we don’t usually see. If you’d like to explore this data further, we’re also providing the Excel table here. Play with it and let us know if you come up with anything interesting.

The next step we’ll take will be to look at this data broken out further by 5 digit SOC codes. Look for that data in a subsequent post.

Read more at Economic Modeling Specialists (EMSI blog)