| The Local Employment Dynamics (LED)
program is a joint effort by the Vermont Department of Labor and the U.S. Census Bureau to
develop measures on local labor market conditions.
LED Data tools
- QWI Online
Select and find out about Quarterly Workforce Indicators by state, geographic area, industry, year and quarter, sex, and age group.
8 Indicators: employment, job flows, job creation, new hires, separations, turnover, earnings and new hire earnings.
4 Geographic areas: state, county, Workforce Investment Board area, Metropolitan Statistical Area.
- Industry Focus
This tool lets you determine the top industries for your local area and your local workers, focus in on a
particular industry to see how it ranks among top industries, and also look at the characteristics of those who
work in that industry. See Industry Focus information sheet.
- OnTheMap
An online mapping and reporting application showing where workers are employed and where they live with companion
reports on worker characteristics and optional filtering by age, earnings, or industry groups.
See OnTheMap summary sheet.
Definitions and Technical Notes
Annual Average Earnings
Earnings data reflect the earnings of workers employed in both full-time and part-time jobs who worked for the full quarter (all three months). The average annual earnings measure includes earnings from individuals who worked more than 40 hours per week as well as those who only worked a few hours during the week. Thus, industries with mostly part-time workers will likely show lower average annual earnings than industries that employ mostly fulltime workers.
Average annual earnings are equal to "average monthly earnings" multiplied by 12, where "average monthly earnings" is total quarterly earnings of all full-quarter employees divided by the number of full-quarter employees, divided by 3.
Earnings Ratio
The earnings ratio shows female earnings as a percentage of male earnings. Since the average annual earnings measures are based on both fulltime and part-time employment, industries with many part-time female workers (compared to part-time male workers) may have lower female-to-male earnings ratios than other industries. The LED earnings ratios differ from the ratios based on the Current Population Survey (CPS); the CPS earnings ratios include only earnings for fulltime wage and salary workers only.
Employment / Jobs
Employment, or jobs, represents fulltime and parttime workers with employers that are covered by the Vermont Unemployment Compensation Law. Not included in these data are self-employed workers, unincorporated firms, elected officials, nonprofit religious, charitable or educational organizations, unpaid family workers, and farm and railroad workers.
The job measures reflect jobs, not people. For example, in a given time period, if an individual has positive earnings at two different firms, two jobs will be counted. Because the data represent the number of jobs, some categories of employment may reflect a larger number than the actual number of people in the category. For example, if women are more likely than men to hold multiple jobs, the number and percent indicated for female employment will be higher than the actual number or percent of women in the workforce. Appropriate interpretations of the data include the following:
"In 2003, educational services positions held by women made up 8.4% of all jobs in Vermont."
"In 2003, people between the ages of 25 and 34 held 19.6% of all jobs in Vermont."
Annual average jobs is the average of "beginning of quarter employment" for the four calendar year quarters.
"Beginning of quarter employment" equals the total number of workers who were employed by the same employer in both
the current and previous quarters. If a worker held more than one job, the job count will reflect all jobs held by
that worker on the first day of the quarter.
Turnover / Job Stability
Turnover is a measure of job stability. Lower turnover industries are more likely to have stable employment. Certain age groups are, on average, more stable in terms of their average job turnover rates.
The turnover rate is the average of new workers plus terminated workers as a percentage of the average total employment from the current and previous quarters. Turnover is based on employment for workers who were employed during the full quarter (all three months). The measure reflects the average proportion of workers entering and leaving employment during the period. Average quarterly turnover for the year is the average of the turnover rates for four consecutive quarters.
Sources of Data
LED data measures are based on wage records from workers covered by the Vermont Unemployment Insurance program; data from the Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages; and, U.S. Census Bureau data sources. Because these data come from a mix of sources, they are not directly comparable with data from other sources, including data from any of three individual sources mentioned.
Standards of Publication and Confidentiality
The Census Bureau and the state partners are required to protect the confidentiality of the data in the LED files.
The approach to avoid disclosure of individual information is to combine cell suppression with the addition of
statistical noise, controlling key measures to county employment levels as reported by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
These statistical techniques used by the Census Bureau mean that the actual statistics are not shown if the numbers in
a cell are small. Rather, the statistics that are shown are “fuzzy,” that is, close to the actual information but not
exact. Thus, the resulting data are less accurate than the full disclosure of exact data points (a complete census),
but they are more accurate than the results of a survey based on a sample of the population.
In the WIB
and Earnings tables at VtLmi,
- An asterisk reflects a value did not meet the standards for publication.
Data may be suppressed in order to protect the confidentiality of individual employee or employer information.
Suppression due to confidentiality occurs when there are fewer than three employers or fewer than three employees
in a category.
- Dashes indicate data is missing for one of the following reasons:
1) if there were no employers operating in the category during
the time period specified; 2) when data required for the calculation of the measure are not available;
3) when there is no employment in the category;
4) when a measure could not be computed due to rounding of the denominator to zero.
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