Jobs and Tertiary Education Indicator User Guide

Purpose

The Jobs and Tertiary Education Indicator provides the tertiary education sector with a common source of labour market information for planning and investment.
While the Indicator has been designed primarily for tertiary education stakeholders, it is hoped that the information will be useful beyond the tertiary sector (e.g. for business groups).

Caveats and Cautions

• The Indicator cannot be used alone for highly detailed planning.  For example, it cannot tell you that there should be training for, say, 32 more plumbers in Napier in any one year.
• The data is good for understanding general trends. As much of the data comes from Census, it is based on self-reported qualifications. This means that small numbers should not be relied on too much. 

Context

Recent tertiary sector reforms introduced a new way of planning for and investing in tertiary education. The Tertiary Education Commission [External Link] has more information on these reforms. As part of the investment system, tertiary education organisations need to plan to take account of labour market needs in a more explicit way, in particular institutes of technology and polytechnics are to develop regional strategies, and industry training organisations are to develop industry strategies.  Good labour market information is an essential input for these strategies.

The Department of Labour has developed this Indicator to bring relevant labour market information into one place, in an easy to use format.

This is part of ongoing work within the Department of Labour to develop and collate information in that is customised to user needs.  You can see the full range of labour market information at the Department’s website. You can also see other Labour Market Analysis Tools.

The Regional Industry Snapshot has information on regional labour markets.  That tool has a similar lay-out to the Jobs and Tertiary Education Indicator, and will be particularly helpful for regional providers.

How to use the INdicator

This section describes how to use the Jobs and Tertiary Education Indicator. The “How to save data” section tells you how to save data for further analysis and other documents. Definitions and information of sources of data are in Annex 1.

The Jobs and Tertiary Education Indicator includes three worksheets that let you explore the information by Field of Study, Industry, or Occupation. 

• The sheet “Explore by Field of Study” has a drop-down menu showing all Fields of Study at the most detailed level.  For each occupation that you select, you will see data about the top 10 occupations for that field of study.
• The "Explore by Industry" sheet has a green drop-down menu showing all industries. You can choose the industry at an aggregated level (3-digit) or a highly detailed level (5-digit). For each industry that you select, you can see data about the top 10 occupations for the industry.
• The "Explore by Occupation" sheet has a green drop-down menu showing all occupations. Data for the selected occupation will appear, together with information about the broader occupational group it belongs to. 

The tool also has

• a Notes and data sources sheet that tells you about the data
• a Master sheet which includes the source data.

Field of Study tab

Click on the “Explore by Field of Study” at the bottom of the screen.

Select a field of study from top drop-down menu in the green cell. The sheet will then show you the top ten occupations for that Field of Study.

The first three lines of data in each column are in light blue. They describe everyone in each occupation who also has the specific field of study.  The rest of each column describes everyone who does that job, regardless of their field of study.

Number employed in 2006 with this main FOS shows how many people in each occupation have their highest qualification in this field of study.

% with highest qual in this FOS employed in each occupation shows the proportion of people with this field of study who are in each occupation.

% employed in each occupation with highest qual in this FOS shows the proportion of people in this occupation who have this field of study.

While these two percentages seem to measure the same thing, they can be very different. See the example below.

Example
Field of Study = Automotive Engineering and Technology

The green area in the graphic shows the total number of people who have their highest qualification in Automotive Engineering and Technology.

The striped area shows the total number of people employed in a related occupation (Motor Mechanics in this example.)

The overlap area is all people who have their highest qualification in Automotive Engineering and Technology AND who work as Motor Mechanics.

The overlapping green striped area shows that:

• 19% of all people with their highest qualification in Automotive Engineering and Technology work as Motor Mechanics. This is line 7 on the Explore by Field of Study sheet: “% with highest qual in this FOS employed in each occupation”
• 50% (half) of all Motor Mechanics have their highest qualification in Automotive Engineering and Technology.  This is line 8 in the Explore by Field of Study sheet: “% employed in each occupation with highest qual in this FOS”

Numbers employed   (lines 9-11)

Lines 9 - 11 tell you about the number of people employed in the given occupation, and employment growth in that occupation, for a five year period, and for a ten year period.

Income   (lines 14 - 15)

The median is the middle income figure, for all income (including rents and dividends) for people working in the occupation.

The average is the total income for everyone in this occupation divided by the number of people in this occupation.

• A bigger gap between the median and average income suggests an occupation with a wider range of incomes – i.e. some very highly paid people, and some less well-paid people.

Because the data is mainly from Census, incomes for some very highly paid occupations will be understated in this tool. (Census codes incomes up to $100,000).

Major industries for this occupation   (lines 16 - 20)

The top five industries for each occupation are given using ANZSIC to 3-digit level.  These figures help identify how concentrated a given occupation is across industries.

Highest educational qualifications   (lines 21 - 24)

The highest level of qualifications show how relatively skilled the people in an occupation are.

• No Qualifications = no qualifications
• School Qualifications = fifth and sixth form qualifications, higher school qualifications, other school qualifications. In today’s terms this might be NCEA levels 1-3, (but remember that some people in the workforce will have done their training forty or more years ago).
• Post-School = basic, intermediate and skilled vocational qualifications below degree level. In today’s terms this is levels 4-6 on the national qualifications framework.
• Degree or higher - Bachelors degree or higher.

Demographic info   (lines 25 - 34)

Gender, ethnic diversity and age and describe people within each occupation.  Because ethnic diversity counts all ethnicities that people identify with, the numbers may add up to more than 100%.
The “Retirement rate” (line 34) is an estimate of the proportion of people within the occupation who will retire each year. It is based on the age profile of people within each occupation.

• These figures can help in thinking about constraints on labour.  If the occupation is dominated by older workers, what planning is there to encourage younger people to enter the occupation?  An occupation facing skill shortages may wish to consider broadening the gender or ethnic mix of their workers, in order to reach new sources of labour.

Vacancies and skill shortages   (lines 35 - 41)

• Number of advertised vacancies reports on the number of vacancies counted in the Department of Labour’s Job Vacancy Monitor, a monthly survey of newspapers advertising.  These numbers are based on vacancy counts from newspaper advertising and don’t take account of internet ads, so they tend to under-report vacancies for many occupations.
• “% growth this year over last year” shows the change between the vacancy numbers advertised in the past two years.  Because more and more employers put job ads on the internet, lots of the growth figures are negative, even though vacancies may be increasing. An increase suggests increased demand for people in that occupation.
• “Vacancy fill rates” show the percentage of vacancies that could be filled 8-10 weeks after advertising.  The figures are from the Department of Labour’s annual report Occupations in Shortage in New Zealand, 2007, from the Survey of Employers who have Recently Advertised (SERA).

Figures below 50% tend to signal an occupation with skill shortages. It is possible for there to be plenty of people with a particular skill set who choose to work in other occupations, so there may not be a skill shortage as such. This can occur because of industry conditions (perhaps the hours of work are not very social) or (low) pay rates.  On the whole a low figure indicates that it was harder to fill a vacancy, and hence could indicate an occupation in shortage. 

• “Detailed DOL report available” shows whether the department has done more detailed work to assess the skill needs of the occupation.  If one has been done, a link to the report will be provided.
• “On an Immigration Skill Shortage List” shows whether Immigration NZ has included the area as a long term or short term skill shortage.  Long term skill shortages tend to be more relevant to tertiary education planning, given the time it takes for people to acquire new qualifications.

How to save data

To save data to a new spreadsheet, so you can use it for other documents and analysis:

1. Highlight the cells you want to save
2. Copy (Ctrl C)
3. Open the spreadsheet you want to save them into
4. Put cursor in the top left cell where you want the paste to begin
5. Edit / Paste, then without changing the highlighting
6. Edit / Paste Special / Values and Number Formats

If you use this sequence, you’ll retain the actual numbers AND the formatting.

Annex 1: Technical information

This information is also included as a separate tab in the Tool itself - see “Notes and Data Sources”