As we explored changes in employment from April 2019 to April 2020 a clear theme emerged: the workers hardest hit by this epidemic were already struggling.
Second only to sweeping illness and death rates, our country is most feeling the impact of
COVID-19 through the greatest unemployment rates since World War II. At Ididio, one of our primary goals is to
provide critical jobs information to help people find rewarding careers, and for
sure a pandemic-proof career will be at top of the list for many of us in the future.
Each dot in the chart below represents a job, and the bigger the dot, the more
people work in that job. We’ve organized the jobs by the approximate median (middle)
annual salary earned by all workers.
The big job losses appear to the left of the chart, and match the jobs we would have
guessed: jobs related to recreation and travel. The jobs with the most security are
to the right and are typically
related to finance and to providing services and information to those
of us stuck at home.
The dots are colored by the typical education held by
workers:
purple jobs: most workers have no education past high school
blue jobs: most workers have some college
green jobs: workers typically hold a bachelor’s degree
orange jobs: a graduate degree is typical
For the most part, we see that the jobs requiring education (green
and orange) were already commanding higher pay, and offered a better degree protection from COVID losses.
Careers by salary and change in employment
Hovering over or touching a career will provide details, and selecting a career will take you to Ididio’s career page.
SOURCES:
2020 BLS Current Employment
2017 ACS microdata
All careers
Selecting a career will take you to Ididio’s career page.
Unfortunately, monthly employment data is typically available by
industry rather than by career, so we had to get a bit creative to estimate the
change in employment.
We began with our aggregations from the American Community Survey. With
a few exceptions, we’re able to classify each worker surveyed by occupation and
by a 3-digit NAICS industry identification. In some cases, the 2-digit classification is all that is
available, and in a few cases a hybrid designation is assigned.
For each ACS job designation, we calculated the percentage of workers within
each industry classification as described above. We also calculated a distribution
for the education attained and the 10th, 25th, 50th, 75th, and 90th salary percentiles for each
ACS job designation.
We then used recently released data from the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s (BLS) Current
Employment Statistics program to calculate the percentage of employment change
from April 2019 to April 2020 by the 2- and 3-digit NAICS classifications. We chose April because that is the month with the
smallest total employment reported by Current Employment Statistics during the pandemic.
In our final step, we combined the BLS employment data with the ACS survey data. For
each job designation, we used the percentage within each industry classification
as weights to average the percentage of employment change calculated using the BLS
data. For the few industry designations that did not match the 2- and 3-digit NAICS
data from the BLS, we simply omitted those workers from our calculation.
SOURCES:
