Who is Looking for Work?

Created by Laura A. Davenport

Turnover is costly to organizations. In an effort to understand DVS members who are looking for work, I reported some basic demographic characteristics. In addition, I examined differences between those looking/not looking for employment to find out whether responses offered by DVS survey respondents supported existing research in the field. Results showed that responses from those looking for work were significantly different from those not looking for work in a number factors studied (e.g., salary, resource availability, support for professional development, and leadership understanding the value of data visualization).

I started by downloading the data into Excel and examining responses for each of the variables to get a better understanding of the data set. I became curious about respondents looking for employment and whether any of the other survey questions might provide clues about why they are looking for work. I conducted a very brief search of the literature to develop a theory-driven approach for selecting survey responses to examine.

As I developed the research question, I anticipated that "looking for work" would be related to salary, availability of professional development funds, having adequate resources, and leader understanding of the value of data visualization. I also considered whether information might be gleaned by looking at respondent frustrations and what they would change about their job.

I had limited tools at hand and set out to complete the project using only MS Excel and MS PowerPoint. I elected to create a static infographic to display the results and set up the project in PowerPoint. Conducting the analyses in Excel required me to learn new processes for calculating chi-square values and t-tests.