A Quick & Dirty Analysis of METRO’s Job Bank Postings
The Libraries in the Context of Capitalism symposium is coming up this week (eep!). A mere three workdays stand between me and some serious hosting duties, and I’m both excited to hear from our excellent speakers and nervous as all get-out to be on the hook for carrying out this ambitious idea.
Fortunately, being able to host this event at in familiar territory gives me time to figure out how to use the whole space to support the event. I am a big fan of using walls and flip chart paper and post-it notes for reflection, particularly during a presentation-heavy event. It’s important to me that everyone leaves feeling heard and supported in their work on these tricky topics.
To get us started in making the space feel inviting and active, I worked with Emily and Charlotte, our wonderful volunteers for this event, on a hand-made visualization of the salary data available in the Job Bank we host. I thought it might be conducive to an event focused on the political economy to make visible some relevant and interesting information about how our potential employers approach the hiring process.
[A quick bit of history: METRO moved to a new website in March 2017, and our Job Bank — a fairly well-known hosting services where libraries, archives, museums, and other information-based workplaces host their opportunities — moved to a Google form around then. The earliest positions for which I had data were posted on April 4, 2017. ]
To create our salary data visualization, I:
- copied the backend of the “add a job” form to my work Google drive
- removed all columns except for institution, job title, and salary
- normalized salary data
- sorted the salary column & deleted the (180!!) rows with no salary information at all
- tagged each row with an “institution type” and deleted all institution names
- lightly edited job titles so as to preserve anonymity
At this point I sent off my data set to Charlotte and Emily so that we could discuss over tea. When we met up, we:
- standardized salary information by converting annual salaries to hourly (assuming 52 weeks in a year, 40 hours a week on the job); this way we could compare hourly positions to salaried positions
- created color-coded sticky notes containing job title and salary
Then it was time to create our visualization. When we met at METRO on Monday morning, we:
- created the frame for the sticky notes
- labeled the x-axis with a hierarchy of jobs within a library or archive
- stuck the stickies in the appropriate position
- labeled the y-axis with dollars per hour
Here’s what we ended up with, before we labeled the Y axis.
And here is a video of the construction process.
The results were more or less what I expected: our Job Bank receives a lot of “professional” library and archives positions, most of which will earn you between $20 and $30 per hour. This works out to a range of $41,600 and $62,400. We didn’t display the availability of benefits, though I noticed during data clean-up that most full-time salaried positions included them.
The outliers in the photo above include a fairly substantial salary for the few director-level positions we received through the Job Bank. And of course we saw plenty of internship positions for which payment was not on offer.
I mention above that 180 rows had to be removed for want of salary information. This handy pie chart shows what kind of information ends up in our compensation field.
My handwriting could be better (but I type pretty fast!), so here’s a breakdown:
- For 180 entires in our Job Bank, the salary field was left blank
- 130 entries included salary information; these were the fodder for our post-it visualization
- 73 postings said salary was “commensurate with experience”
- 19 provided a bunch of words, but no figures
- 16 said their salary is “competitive”
- 4 provided a link to their own site with a salary schedule included
There are lots of reasons why an institution might choose to ignore the salary field altogether. That said, I think it would be great to have more transparency in this stage of the hiring process, if only so that we can make appropriate choices as to how to spend our time when applying for positions.
I’m looking forward to seeing what our symposium participants make of this. We’re open to “edits” to our visualization, and we’ll provide sticky notes in case anyone is interested in adding their own experience to our visualization.
❤
