Wage and Employment in Onondaga County

I pulled this data set from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages Annual Data: Beginning 2000. This sets reports both employment numbers and average wages broken up by county and also by job function. 

Because there were so many job functions listed, I decided to group many of them together so the visualizations were easier to digest. You'll see those specific visualizations below, and I potentially may have miscategorized some of the the job functions, but tried to match based on the names.

The first visualization shows that overall, annual wages are increasing across New York State, which makes sense because of inflation. New York County draws the highest wages by far, with Westchester County following with the second highest average wages in the state. I highlighted Onondaga County in orange since I live in Onondaga County and I will focus on it more in visualizations below.

New York County sees an increase in wages of about $30,000 from 2000 to 2014. Onondaga County saw a raise in wages by about $13,000.  Many counties see wages flat or decreasing from 2007-2009, thanks to the economic recession.

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This visualizations shows the same information as the visualization above, but looks at a map of all the counties. You can scroll through to see how the counties change each year. Red shaded counties mean the average wage is below $40,000. Blue means the average wage is above $40,000. You can see an increasing number of counties turning blue over time - again thanks to inflation and rising wages. 

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Now we'll look at average wages over time for different job functions, specifically in Onondaga County. Not all job functions have been measured every year, and again, I made the choice of how to group the jobs functions. Utility and finance jobs garner the highest average wages. Data and Information Services had a large jump in 2002, but since has dropped and flattened out. Finance suffered in the economic recession and is only now getting back to the same average wages as before the recession. 

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While finance and utilities pay the best in Onondaga County, health, government, and administrative support jobs are the most plentiful. Those jobs that pay the most? They are some of the rarest jobs in the county, with fewer than 2,000 people working in the field. Health, accommodation, and education jobs are all on the rise, in terms of employment.

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What else do you see? Any other insights that you find interesting?