Tuesday, June 23, 2015

The numbers game

The vocational expert testifies to the presence of a hundred thousand jobs as a small product assembler -- do you believe it?

There are 145 million jobs in the nation.  There are 12,500 ish DOT codes.  On average, there are 11,600 jobs per DOT code.  But there are a whole lot more of certain jobs -- mostly skilled and semi-skilled.  Do you believe that any unskilled job has significantly more than the statistical average?

OK, vocational expert without any statistical expertise how did you get those numbers?

What are the Standard Occupational Classification groups for the occupations you identified?

There are 23 groups of SOC groups.  There are 818 different line item SOC codes.  Give me the one for this DOT code.

What are the North American Industry Classification System codes?

Work exists in certain industries.  The Census Bureau describes the numbers of jobs by NAICS code.  It is called County Business Patterns.

With the SOC and NAICS codes, anyone can look up the numbers of jobs within those intersections.  The BLS publishes employment projections that do exactly that.

How many production workers have jobs in the wood product manufacturing industry -- about 3,800. Look at line 48.

The wood product manufacturing industry employs 337,900 people.  Please don't tell me that a third of the people in that industry group have jobs as a dowel inspector.  I am not that naive.