It’s taken me about 5 months to get there, but thanks to your help, my award-winning Unemployment Dashboard ranks #1 according to Google. I also rank #1 for the words, ‘Unemployment Insights’. I suspect the postings featuring my dashboard over at chartporn and vizworld have helped quite a bit. Thanks Chartporn & VizWorld! BTW, if you haven’t checked out either site, you should, they are filled with many excellent visualizations.
There’s a lot going on this month in the industry index section on the bottom right hand side of the dashboard. Many industries are seeing strong and continued growth in the amount of hours their employees are working. Expansion in these figures is a leading indicator of hiring down the road. In addition, to provide you with a bit more context, I’ve expanded the time horizon on the industry index section from the last 6 months to the last 12 months.
Something else I noticed this month is the divergence between the unemployment rate and underemployment rate (upper left-hand chart). The unemployment rate held steady, but the underemployment rate rose 1.8%, from 16.5% to 16.8%. That’s an additional half-million underemployed Americans. If you’d like to bone up on the difference between underemployment and unemployment, check out this link.
One other point worth noting is this month’s decrease in the percentage of long term unemployed. For only the second time this year, the percentage of those unemployed for more than 6 months fell. Granted, the decrease was very small, .3% or 50,000 workers.
I welcome your comments, both positive and negative. I especially want to hear your thoughts on improving this dashboard. In particular, I’m considering getting rid of and/or dramatically altering the bar chart on the left side of the dash showing the number of un/underemployed Americans. I think the scaling of the chart makes differences in the blue bars hard to pick up, I also don’t like the lack of context in the chart. Perhaps indexing it to 1 year ago might be better.
If you’d like to print out or save a copy of a beautiful, high-res, 11 x 17 pdf version of this dashboard, just click here.
Thanks.
