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I pointed out earlier that there were problems with the way that I formatted and worded the question on careers. Luigi Zanasi, who is an economist (and fellow precision sawdust manufacturer) and does this kind of thing all the time, kindly offered to take a look at the raw data for the careers and restructure it so that it would be presented in a manner more consistent with the way that this kind of data is normally, read professionally, presented.
I looked over his results for some time trying to figure out all the ins and outs of the differences in classification amongst the plethora of occupations versus types of industries, and ended up pouring myself a healthy dose of Irish whiskey. I guess that is why Luigi is the economist and I'm not. Rather than try to interpret things I will simply show you in graphical form, his graphs, what the end result is.
Keep in mind the main problem was that I was confusing terms describing occupational types with terms describing industry types, thus mixing them all up into an unidentifiable mess that needed a good housecleaning. Using the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) and standard occupational codes, Luigi grouped the data into the appropriate group where possible, and for those descriptions that just wouldn't fit he made some assumptions to simplify matters. For example, in the industry data, all engineers were grouped under Professional and Technical Services unless they specified another industry in their response. In fact he could match very few of the descriptions with the standard occupational classifications so he restructured the responses to fit.
Here is the graph of the responses as placed in the proper categories according to the NAICS.
Here is the data presented in a slightly different way, as organized into the appropriate standard occupational classifications.
Here are a few more notes I forgot to add when I first wrote this. Luigi says, "the Canada/US numbers seem pretty valid." He goes on to say, and I am just going to quote his email here rather than try to reword what he has already stated so elegantly, that:
(although) the survey is not statistically rigorous, as I said before, the results are pretty robust and can be viewed as having some validity. At least there does not seem to be any bias in terms of the nationality of respondents.
Credits I would like to give credit where credit is due. First of all, thanks to Luigi Zanasi who took the mess I gave him and organized it into something that makes much more sense and from which future surveys (if I am nuts enough to conduct them) may be more properly formatted. I can see now how this question can be asked to give much better responses. Thanks very much Luigi. Also, I would like to thank Statistics Canada for providing the NAICS and occupational classifications that Luigi used to sort out the data (sorry I don't know the names of the exact documents). Lastly, thanks to those who took the time to respond to the survey. It has been much fun.
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