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QUESTION: How is a "job" selected to be included in the Assessor Series? What is the wage and salary survey sample size? How do we know that a valid sample size was used to calculate the Assessor Series area wage differentials?
ERI has adopted the DOT’s definition of an “occupation,” used for decades by professionals, courts and experts and also has added a selection/use threshold based on the generally accepted “norms” of US Administrative Law (ALJ) courts. “Job” equals “occupation.” When ERI talks of a specific job with an incumbent, it may use the term “position.”
This differs from O*NET’s “occupational groups” which are job groups, often called “job families” (eDOT also defines “occupational groups” with its first three digits of eDOT’s nine digit code). O*NET states it has “800 occupations” (it misuses the term). The DOL/OES/BLS surveys combine data (roll up O*NET stragglers) into 742 OES/SOC job families. The US Census continues this roll-up into 471 Census Occupations (while adding an occupation, “Logisticians”).
ERI’s Assessor Series reports on thousands of specific occupations (varying each quarter by additions of new jobs and compressions of waning jobs). Each must satisfy the following criteria:
•A unique, non-industry specific job title.
•A unique “primary duty” requiring an identifiable skill, if existent.
•Two to three unique additional task statements (with related skills, abilities and/or knowledge required)
•An ERI eSemantic low score of job match relevancy as compared to other specific eDOT occupations.
ERI’s Job Availability Survey
Jobs are known to exist if:
•They are reported in published salary surveys with listed survey participant names and incumbent counts.
•Their job titles and/or specific descriptions are found on disability claim forms (California).
•They have been collected by ERI’s eSpideri’s data mining of specific job postings (ERI’s Find Jobs) and are complete, specific and matched to a bona fide employing entity (matched to ERI’s Potential Employer list); vague, general descriptions from “Company Unknown” are not analyzed.
•ERI field job analyst input, including cybernetic use of eDOT, report the existence of these occupations and their work measures and duties as found in an on-site job analysis.
Additional evidence of a job’s existence* is noted, but not determined by:
•Users of SalaryExpert’s salary calculator (almost ½ million searches each month); this is the second most popular of the free data sites (and reports conservative government job family salary data).
•Requests for “new titles” whenever the Occupational Assessor application is first used (in a “submit process”) and requests by ERI subscribers.
ERI's goal is to provide its findings of the numbers of incumbents actually engaged in any specific job's work. The eDOT Skills Project creates an estimate of these jobs' existence in any of over 12 million known US employers. Because ERI now collects data from various sources (the five levels described), care is taken not to overstate the numbers of jobs represented (salary surveys may report on the same job, differing collection techniques may retrieve duplicate data, etc.)
When it comes to the Executive Compensation Assessor & Survey and the Nonprofit Compensation Assessor & Tax-Exempt Survey where all SEC 10-K, 8-K, proxies and all IRS Form 990 EOs/PFs/ EZs are read, the Assessor Series is more a 100% census than it is a survey (with a random sample).
For example, in health care, the survey sample size represents all known hospital executive pay levels (as reported on proxies for the for-profit hospitals and all nonprofit hospitals -- missing only or where their required federal reports are missing). All data collected for the Executive Compensation Assessor and Salary Assessor are utilized in the Geographic Assessor area salary differential analyses (the national data forms the "x-axis.")
The exact methodology of ERI statistical calculations is proprietary, and the exact combination and weighting varies by geographic area (according to the availability of wage/salary data). That said, what has occurred with area salary differentials is the emergence of differing geographic differentials by job function and industry. Health care geographic differentials, for example, differ remarkably from general private industry differentials. (The Salary Assessor and Nonprofit Compensation Assessor may use differing geographic differentials.) Areas have been traditionally described in the Assessor Series based on a city, county, state or province, and country methodology. Because of ERI's Job Availability Survey (used to identify jobs to be included in the Salary Assessor and other Assessors and in the Occupational Assessor disability determination applications), ERI has begun to use even more finite definitions (in the US) using the US Census Bureau’s TIGER® System.
Addresses of employers, disability claimants or job searchers can be pinpointed using US geographic/address data and matched to the closest potential employers. For the job searcher or outplacement specialist, employers within a specific number of miles of an individual’s residence that are expected to employ a specific job can be identified. For disability determinations, employers with known jobs of certain physical and mental capacities within a specific number of miles can be identified. Labor markets can be defined (and easily described via maps provided by sites such as Yahoo or Google). Competitors can be identified; probable staffing patterns can be estimated. In the US, this is accomplished by using the publicly available databases of the TIGER® databases. ERI’s Assessor Series allow for searches within a known radius of a specified office or residence or employer's address.
To learn more about how data from multiple salary surveys are combined in the Assessor Series, see Assessor Series FAQ #31.