EMSI Releases New Version of Analyst, Now with Job Posting Analytics

EMSI is pleased to announce the beta release of the newly redesigned Analyst, our labor market data analysis tool used by many practitioners in higher education, workforce and economic development, and strategic workforce planning.

The reengineered Analyst features EMSI’s comprehensive labor market data plus new job posting analytics in a more intuitive interface. We’ve simplified the workflow so clients can quickly tap into important, strategic information about their region’s economy and workforce. We’ve also built the new Analyst with room to grow, so we can add fresh data and reports that best serve and inform our customers.

Here are the big things to know about the new version of our flagship tool:

Job Posting Analytics

EMSI’s new job posting analytics (JPA) broadens the perspective Analyst provides on the labor market. Complementing the historic and projected employment data we present throughout Analyst, the JPA report shows monthly total and unique (or de-duplicated) job postings by occupation for any region. The report also parses job postings by company and city (so that you can see, for example, how many software developer postings Amazon is advertising for in Seattle).

As we’ve written before, job postings can be tricky to decipher. One posting can represent a company’s intention to hire 30 people, or 30 postings can represent only one real job opening. To provide context to our postings data, we’ve developed two additional data metrics that are showcased in the JPA report:

• Posting Intensity: This is a ratio of total job postings to unique jobs postings. The higher the posting intensity ratio, the more effort employers are putting toward hiring. Posting intensity is available by detailed occupation, by company for specific occupations, and by region.

• Unique Postings vs. Hires: This compares unique monthly job postings to average monthly hires. Postings are unevenly distributed across sectors; some industries don’t use the internet to look for talent, or at least not as much as others. Jobs in fields like IT and health care tend to have many more de-duplicated postings than hires in any given month, while jobs in construction, production, education, and other sectors tend to have lots more hires than postings (see our comparison of software developers and welders). By pairing hires and postings, we give you valuable information on how actual hiring in any occupation in your region stacks up to how employers are advertising for jobs.

Smarter Search

The search bar, now more prominent, allows you to intuitively hunt for reports, regions, occupations, industries, and educational programs by keyword, all in one spot. Its new, smarter programming means you can search for a generic job title (like “doctor”) and get results on occupations that best match that term, even if that title isn’t in the BLS’s Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system. Analyst’s new search also yields industries that employ doctors and programs that train for doctors that you can click on right from the search bar.

You can even search for the skills, tools of the trade, and attributes that characterize an occupation or industry. A search for “microscope,” for instance, brings up occupations like medical and clinical laboratory technologists and microbiologists, as well as related industries (e.g., optical instrument and lens manufacturing). Click on any of these search results to go immediately to a specific report or data tab.

Simplified Workflow

We’ve made it easier to get to the data you need. Click on the any of the task cards on the homepage to research job growth, wages, or any metric by data type: industries, occupations, educational programs, job postings, demographics, or input-output. That same basic report structure can be accessed using the “Reports” dropdown at the top of the page no matter where you are in the tool.

The Return of Legacy Reports

We’ve brought back legacy reports from older versions of Analyst after hearing from many clients who found them helpful. The design of the reports has been refreshed, but they still provide easy access to data such as the highest-ranked occupations in your region by size, pay, job growth, regional competitiveness (shift share), and concentration (location quotient).

Interested in the New Analyst? Contact Us.

Current Analyst subscribers can choose to upgrade to the new version of Analyst after logging in (click here). For more information on the labor market research tool and EMSI’s data, contact Rob Sentz: rob@economicmodeling.com, 208-883-3500. Follow EMSI on Twitter (@DesktopEcon) or check us out on LinkedIn and Facebook.