How the Job Numbers Are Made: teacher key

Jobs and Careers, grade 12 edition, written for 12th grade and up. Every figure about work comes from a method: a sample of homes, a list of 867 occupations, projections that look ten years ahead. Here is what each measure counts, and what it leaves out.

Read the book. Print this page for the key.

Questions and answers

1. Why does BLS measure employment with a monthly sample?
   • A sample is always exact, so nothing more is ever needed
   • Calling every home each month would cost too much (answer)
   • Unemployment insurance claims already give a full count of workers
2. Which worker counts as employed in the survey?
   • Someone with a job who was off sick that week (answer)
   • Someone who had no job and did no work all week long
   • Someone who worked for only one year at one job
3. Why does a fast rate of growth not always mean many new jobs?
   • Fast growth is always counted twice by the BLS in its tables
   • BLS only ever shows growth as whole numbers of jobs, never rates
   • A small job can grow fast but add few jobs (answer)
4. What did the researchers find about automation's negative effects from 1980 to 2018?
   • They were smaller than they were from 1940 to 1980
   • They were over twice as great as in 1940 to 1980 (answer)
   • They did not exist at all in any of those years
5. What does BLS say about its AI exposure categories?
   • They count how many workers use AI at work each day
   • They predict which jobs will vanish in a few years
   • They compare jobs without showing AI's effects (answer)
6. What does a median wage show?
   • Half earned more and half earned less (answer)
   • The wage a brand-new worker is first offered in the job
   • The highest wage that anyone gets in the job

Words

• occupation: kind of job
• median: middle value
• augmentation: boosting human work
• sample: small part counted
• exposure: chance AI helps
• tenure: time with employer