The “Occupational Reports” section provides information about individual occupations. The data presented in the reports were obtained from the 2004 Regional Workforce Survey. In short, 3,130 establishments from 29 counties in the workforce commuting region of Lubbock, TX participated in the survey.

Occupations are organized and ordered according to the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System as administered by the National Bureau of Labor Statistics. All workers are classified into one of over 820 occupations according to their occupational definition. To facilitate classification, occupations are combined to form 23 major groups. This site does not include military specific occupations and thus presents 22 major occupational categories. Within these 22 categories are about 800 specific occupations. The 2004 Regional Workforce Survey provides at least one observation for 563 occupations and at least five observations for 314 occupations. The occupational categories are intuitive groupings, but users can search for specific occupation codes here.

• Report Outline
• Interpreting Reports
• Obtaining Reports

Each occupational report is designed to provide information useful to both jobseekers and employers. Each report is organized as follows:

• Occupational Description
  • SOC number and description
  • Number of respondents for this occupation

• Skills, Training, and Qualifications
  • Top desired skills, training, or qualifications
  • Importance of qualifications to employers
  • Necessity for training new hires
  • Methods for training new hires

• Salary and Benefits
  • Salary (annual or hourly quartiles)
    • Regional salary information from the 2004 Regional Workforce Survey
    • State salary information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2002)
    • National salary information from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2002)
  • Benefits (% of respondents offering specific benefits)

• Staffing Patterns and Recruitment
  • Staffing (vacancies, turnover)
  • Top recruiting methods
  • Full-time

It is important to recognize the limitations of any data presentation. In the case of occupational reports, it is important to remember that the data are often presented as averages or medians, and these descriptive statistics are estimates. In general, the quality of an estimate increases as the number of observations increases. Therefore, it is important to interpret occupational reports in light of the number of observations used to calculate the descriptive statistics such as averages, medians, or quartiles. In many cases, the number of cases upon which estimates are based is small.

Users can obtain occupational reports by following these steps.

1. Select the region for consideration. Users may select Lubbock County, the South Plains Workforce Development Area (including Lubbock County), and the entire workforce commuting region (90 mile radius from Lubbock, TX). Users obtain the most data by selecting the entire workforce commuting region. For example, users can obtain reports with at least one observation for 563 occupations if the entire workforce commuting area is selected. Selecting the South Plain Workforce Development Area provides at least one observation for 524 occupations, and selecting Lubbock County provides observations for 474 occupations. Selecting different regions will produce different reports for the same occupation because only data from the selected region are used to calculate the occupational report. For example, a report on “cashiers” using Lubbock County as the region will differ from the report on “cashiers” using the entire workforce commuting region.

2. Select occupations of interest. Occupations are categorized according to six digit Standard Occupational Codes. Select the box for occupations of interest. You may select more than one occupation in more than one category. Proceed to the next page.

3. Save occupations of interest (optional). The next page presents a menu of occupations that the user has selected. Users have the option of saving this set of occupations for review at a later time, but they may view reports without saving queries. To save the set of occupational reports, users must select the occupations to be saved and click “Save checked queries.” Users will then be prompted to create a user ID and password. This process saves the users' chocies and enables them to return to the site and obtain access to the set of pre-defined occupational reports by going to “My Reports” on the home page.

4. View reports. Select an individual occupation to view the report specifics. The menu of focus occupations is coded to indicate whether an occupational report has five or fewer responses. If there were no data collected about an occupation, the report will contain only an SOC description.

5. Print reports. On the View Reports page is an option given to view the report in a more printer friendly format. It is located at the top right of the page and redirects the user to a page that displays only the report.

6. Session. Since the wizard relys on user feedback throughout the survey to display a specific report, a time delay of 15 minutes will result in the wizard timing out.