I hoped to see whether the public and private sector has regained jobs lost in the pandemic in MA. I also wanted to zoom in on certain sectors to see if job loss where any job loss has been concentrated.
I found that the private and local government sectors have rebounded in MA. However, the state government sector has yet to regain all jobs lost in the pandemic. Hard-hit sectors include state government hospitals, which lost 1,000 jobs for a 20% drop. The state government education sector also saw a drop -- this sector includes teaching assistants. The hospital sector overall rebounded in the pandemic - but I found that nursing homes have yet to recover.
I used an API to look through various Bureau of Labor Statistic series and compare data from May 2023 to May 2019.
I started with BLS Data Finder.
I used the following data sets for the state of Massachusetts:
State Government Educational Services
Government - State Government Excluding Education
Nursing and Residential Care Facilities
I used for loops to go through the data and get variables to analyze the data. Then I simply subtracted the new minus the old values, then divided over the old to find the percent change. I used if statements to analyze whether May 2023 employment figures were greater than or equal to May 2019 figures.
A section about what new skills, approaches, etc you used, or where you grew the most during the project
I gained new skills in working with APIs (and getting used to the slowness of APIs) to find the data I want and conduct basic analysis. This code could function as a tracker I could use in future projects.
A section about things you tried to do or wanted to do but did not have the skills/time (but if you have more time you might do)
It would be interesting to get breakdowns for the state government educational services data (like are these mostly teaching assistants, etc). I had a tough time figuring out how to find the datasets I wanted on the BLS site. I'd like to next do a look at nursing home closures and CMS staffing data to find out which nursing homes have lost the most workers.
Link to Github project: here