Where the Information Comes From

The information we used in creating this book comes from three major government sources:

The U.S. Department of Labor: We used several data sources to construct the information we put into this book. We started with the jobs included in the U.S. Department of Labor’s O*NET database. The O*NET includes information on about 950 occupations and is now the primary source of detailed information on occupations. The Labor Department updates the O*NET on a regular basis, and we used the most recent one available, version 13. Because we wanted to include earnings, growth, number of openings—information not part of the O*NET—we used sources at the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The Occupational Employment Statistics survey provided the most reliable figures on earnings we could obtain, and the Employment Projections program provided t....