Hello all,
Last time, I talked about how a simple unemployment rate is often not useful in the overall job market and even less so for specific fields. This was because the unemployment rate is not a perfect picture of the economy and because it's hard to pin down what exactly the labor force IS for any field, making it next to impossible to derive an actual rate.
Today, I'll talk about a slightly more useful statistic--absolute numbers.
There are two important numbers. There's the absolute number of jobs available in the job market and the number of jobs added per annum. How can these numbers be useful? They can be compared to numbers and used as the raw materials for more complicated calculations.
For example, what if you wanted to figure out, like I am, how the job market for lawyers is receiving new graduates. You could try and find employment rates post-graduation for law school graduates from all the various institutes and try to put them together for a meaningful number, or you could take the absolute numbers for graduates and compare that to the absolute numbers of jobs added in a year and compare them. If the number of jobs added a year is far lower than the number of new law school graduates, you would know that something's and that maybe attending law school wasn't worth it. If it's higher, you know that there's a very high demand for lawyers and that jobs are plentiful.
Next time I'll talk about salary by percentile and its use.
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