Cassidy Arrington

Yale’s Office of Career Strategy now hosts a tool on its website that contains data on a multitude of jobs in the U.S. market. 

For each job category, the tool presents data on core tasks, employment trends, top employers, education levels, annual earnings, technical skills, core competencies and job titles. The different jobs can be navigated by selecting keywords or by filtering for industry and occupation. Data is available by state and by county, and the site is updated quarterly. 

“Our hope is that many people will use [the tool] and find value in it,” said OCS Director Jeanine Dames. “But our particular target audience is, obviously, our students, certainly faculty and staff and our alumni.”

Users are not required to have access to Yale CAS in order to utilize the Job Market Insights tool. It is available to everyone, regardless of Yale affiliation.The data hosted on the website is not Yale-specific, but focuses on the national job market as a whole.

OCS staff hope that a wide variety of people will make use of the tool. According to Dames, the tool will aid its viewers in finding salary information, searching job data by geographical area and targeting certain employers.

The OCS often uses the tool during in-person advising sessions, Dames said. The tool can aid students in finding the right job and employer, as well as help make sure that the student is proficient in the right areas of expertise for the job. 

“The interesting thing about the tool is it provides information on jobs and career tracks,” Dames said. “It also provides information on specific geographic area.”

Job data can be broken down by state and county. If a student is interested in working in a specific location, the tool can help determine job availability in that area. If demand for a certain job is exhibiting a downward trend in a particular area, the student can then search in other counties and compare employment trends between locations. 

All data points for each county are refreshed and surveyed quarterly. The data for the statistics is sourced from a company called Lightcast, which in turn sources its data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“It gives the user a way to stay on top of trends,” said Laurie Coppola, senior associate director of OCS. “Like for mechanical engineers, it’s a 5.85 percent increase [in job availability], but some others, like a quant finance job, it’s more than a 9 percent increase, you know, which is more in demand.”

The employment trends statistic is a graph that shows the popularity of a particular job, containing data on the number of positions over time. Data starts in 2020 and projections are forecasted up to 2032. 

Just below the employment trends graph sits the education levels pie chart, which details the education level of employees working within a particular job. This data is broken down into four categories: a bachelor’s degree, an associate degree, some college and a high school diploma. The data for this graph is provided by O*NET, the Occupational Information Network.

The site also contains a list of the technical skills most associated with a given career. These technical skills are determined by gauging the number of times a certain skill is required by a job post. Examples of technical skills include budget analysis, accounting, changing oil, law enforcement and electrical wiring. 

Next to this list is an array of core competencies. These competencies are also important skills for a given career, but are broadly focused instead of technical. Examples of core competencies include active listening, reading comprehension, critical thinking and coordination. 

The site also dedicates a graph towards annual earnings. The data is broken down by a defined set of percentile ranges: 10, 25, 50, 75 and 90 percent. The listed earnings figures include the base pay rate, cost of living allowances, guaranteed pay, hazardous duty pay, incentive pay, on-call pay and tips. Data from this graph is taken from the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program. 

“It can give people information about not just the students, but what people across the country are doing,” said Kristin McJunkins, director of health professions advising and STEM Connect at OCS. “So, you know, when students are thinking about locations or industries or things like that, it just gives them broader touch points for information, which is valuable.”

Yale OCS is located at 55 Whitney Ave.