Questions people ask
About the data, the words, updates and sponsorship.
Where do the numbers come from?
Online job ads come from the Internet Vacancy Index published by Jobs and Skills Australia. Employment, unemployment and participation come from Labour Force, Australia, published by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. Both are released monthly under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence. Each page names the release and its date.
Is the number of job ads the same as the number of jobs?
No. The index counts new ads placed on three large job boards in a month, after removing duplicates. Many jobs are filled without an online ad, and one ad can be for several positions. It is a good guide to which way hiring is moving, not a count of vacancies.
Why do some figures differ from what I see elsewhere?
National and state pages use seasonally adjusted figures, which remove regular patterns such as the summer slowdown. Region and four-digit occupation figures are three-month averages, which is how Jobs and Skills Australia publishes them. Regional totals are not meant to add up to state totals. Publishers also revise recent months when new data arrives.
What do "rising", "falling" and "steady" mean here?
They follow fixed rules. For job ads, a change of more than 5% over twelve months is rising or falling; anything smaller is steady. For the unemployment rate, the line is 0.3 percentage points over twelve months. The methodology page lists every rule.
How often is the site updated?
When new monthly data is released and loaded. Each page shows the reference month and the release date of the data it uses.
Can I use the charts and numbers?
The underlying data is licensed by its publishers under CC BY 4.0, so you can reuse it with attribution to them. Our wording and design are ours; ask us if you want to republish a page.
Why are some pages marked as not for search engines?
Region and detailed occupation pages are generated from the same template for many places and groups. They are useful to readers but thin on their own, so we ask search engines not to list them. National, state, major occupation group and briefing pages are listed.
Do sponsors influence what is published?
No. Sponsors are acknowledged as sponsors and nothing more. They do not see pages in advance, choose topics, or change any number or sentence.
I found a mistake. What should I do?
Tell us through the contact page, with the page address. We check it against the publisher's release and correct it if we got it wrong.