COVID-19 is having a massive impact on our workforce in New Zealand, but it can be hard to understand which jobs may be impacted the most. Inspired by the work of Peter Ellis at Nous Group, Figure.NZ has combined Stats NZ data from the 2018 Census with data on workplace contexts from O*Net.
Our goal is to help you understand the different types of work done by people in different jobs in New Zealand, like how much face-to-face contact the job normally has, and to put that in context by combining it with the number of people working in those jobs, and the income of those people. This data can be further explored by different geographic areas of New Zealand, and different demographic characteristics, like age, ethnicity, sex, and full-time/part-time status.
We hope this will help people to understand and make more informed decisions about how we work during the COVID-19 crisis, and enable our decision makers to make the best decisions possible about how they can provide support to our most vulnerable people.
Which jobs have the highest number of over 65s whose jobs require close proximity and face-to-face work?
Which jobs have the most workers doing at-risk work for the lowest pay?
Which areas of New Zealand have higher proportions of people working in jobs that may be impacted?
Which jobs already use email and phone a lot and may be better placed for transition to long-term remote work?
Data from the 2013 Census showed us that women are more likely to look after children, people who are ill, and people with disabilities in their own households and other households. Our analysis suggests that the paid work women undertake is more likely to have high levels of contact with others, face-to-face discussions, and proximity to others, paired with lower pay. How might these factors impact one other.
We have made 4 data visualisations. Each visualisation looks at the workplace contexts for different jobs, mapping that against the number of people and median personal income. Each can be filtered by location and job category. In addition, the 4 visualisations look at:
You can view these below ⬇️, or on our Tableau page. The Tableau workbooks can be downloaded and examined using Tableau's free public offering. You can also download the source datasets below.
Workplace contexts or characteristics are a way for us to understand what the work experience is like for people in different jobs.
The workplace context data we're using in this analysis is from O*Net. The Occupational Information Network (ONET) is developed under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Labor/Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA) through a grant to the North Carolina Department of Commerce. ONET regularly surveys workers in the United States about what their jobs entail.