Them:jobs of the world Plan: 1. Data Complexities 2. Earnings 3. Projected Growth and Number of Job Openings 4. Education or Training Required 5. Other Job Characteristics - For those of you who like details, we present some of the complexities inherent in our sources of information and what we did to make sense of them here. You don’t need to know these things to use the book, so jump to the next section of the introduction if details bore you. We selected the jobs partly on the basis of economic data, and we include information on earnings, projected growth, and number of job openings for each job throughout this book. We think this information is important to most people, but getting it for each job is not a simple task.
- Earnings
- The employment security agency of each state gathers information on earnings for various jobs and forwards it to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. ! is information is organized in standardized ways by a BLS program called Occupational Employment Statistics, or OES. To keep the earnings for the various jobs and regions comparable, the OES screens out certain types of earnings and includes others, so the OES earnings we use in this book represent straight-time gross pay exclusive of premium pay. More specifi cally, the OES earnings include each job’s base rate; cost-of-living allowances; guaranteed pay; hazardousduty pay; incentive pay, including commissions and production bonuses; on-call pay; and tips. ! e OES earnings do not include back pay, jury duty pay, overtime pay, severance pay, shift diff erentials, nonproduction bonuses, or tuition reimbursements.
- Also, self-employed workers are not included in the estimates, and they can be a signifi cant segment in certain occupations. When data on annual earnings for an occupation is highly unreliable, OES does not report a fi gure, which meant that we reluctantly had to exclude from this book a few occupations such as Hunters and Trappers. For each job, we report three fi gures related to earnings:
- The Annual Earnings fi gure shows the median earnings (half earn more, half earn less).
- The Beginning Wage fi gure shows the 10th percentile earnings (the fi gure that exceeds the earnings of the lowest 10 percent of the workers). ! is is a rough approximation of what a beginning worker may be off ered.
- The Earnings Growth Potential fi gure represents the ratio between the 10th percentile and the median. In a job for which this fi gure is high, you have great potential for increasing your earnings as you gain experience and skills.
- When the fi gure is low, it means you will probably need to move on to another occupation to improve your earnings substantially. For the 283 SOC jobs in this book, the earnings growth potential ranges from a high of 59.9% for Music Directors and Composers to a low of 10.5% for Postal Service Clerks. Because the percentage fi gures would be hard to interpret, we use verbal tags to indicate the level of Earnings Growth Potential: “very low” when the percentage is less than 25%, “low” for 25–35%, “medium” for 35%–40%, “high” for 40%–50%, and “very high” for any fi gure higher than 50%. For the highest-paying jobs, those for which BLS reports the median earnings as “more than $145,600,” we are unable to calculate a fi gure for Earnings Growth Potential
- The median earnings for all workers in all occupations were $31,410 in May 2007. ! e 283 SOC jobs in this book were chosen partly on the basis of good earnings, so their average is a respectable $45,793. (! is is a weighted average, which means that jobs with larger workforces are given greater weight in the computation. It also is based on the assumption that a job with income reported as “more than $145,600” pays exactly $145,600, so the actual average is somewhat higher.)
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