Opportunity, and what moves it
Every occupation is scored on five published pillars, and policy levers are attached only where the research supports them, each with a confidence band.
The problem
A workforce board mostly wants to know which occupations to invest in and what would help them grow, and composite scores usually fall short of that in two ways. Their weights are seldom published or justified, and the interventions they suggest carry no evidence grade, so a pilot study counts for as much as a randomized trial. Most of this work goes into fixing those two failings, the unpublished weights and the missing evidence grades.
How it works
01Five pillars, all shown
Demand, wages, access, transitions and resilience are each measured from public data and shown next to the score, so no one has to take the index on faith. A wage floor is reported alongside as metadata, outside the weighting.
02Stability, tested
Rankings are stress-tested by shifting the normalization anchors. An occupation whose rank stays put can be trusted, one whose rank flips gets flagged by the index, and rank stability stays above 98% under these tests.
03Levers only with evidence
Interventions come from a curated research corpus, and each one carries its effect range, its interval and a breakdown of the evidence into causal, quasi-experimental and observational studies. Null results are kept, and every magnitude comes from a published study.
04Synthesis where decisions happen
The index, the levers and the forward-looking signals come together in standing dashboards on one shared data lake, with transition pathways for each occupation and state-level views a board can put in front of its members.
Every occupation is scored on five pillars and the index ranks them, with the pillars shown so the score can be checked.
Estimated effect on pipeline completions, from the research literature, each shown with its confidence band.
Three standing dashboards run on the same data lake, behind one selector and one layout, each studio covering one topic with its own set of live views and each view showing the level it runs at.
Tools used
Final state
The index runs in production in one state, with 227 occupations fully scored, and is built to roll out across a ten-state cohort. The lever library holds a curated corpus of about 1,200 research findings mapped through controlled vocabularies, with evidence tiers attached and null results kept. The occupations, pillar values and lever magnitudes on this page are synthetic, so that no client's numbers appear.