How we read the data

The data

Online job ads: the Internet Vacancy Index (IVI) from Jobs and Skills Australia counts new job ads lodged each month on SEEK, CareerOne and Workforce Australia, removes duplicates within and across those boards, and codes each ad to an occupation, a skill level and a region. National and state series are published seasonally adjusted and as trend. Region series (37 IVI regions) and four-digit occupation series are published as three-month moving averages.

Labour force: Labour Force, Australia from the Australian Bureau of Statistics gives employment, unemployment, the unemployment rate and the participation rate each month, from a household survey. We use seasonally adjusted figures for Australia and the six states, and trend figures for the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, because the ABS state table publishes trend and original figures only for the territories.

Occupation groups are those Jobs and Skills Australia uses in the IVI: the eight major groups of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO), and two-digit groups that JSA has customised to fit job ads (codes such as 1A or 2E are JSA's own).

How numbers become words

Every sentence on a data page is produced by a rule from the published values. Changes are worked out from the unrounded numbers, and the rule is then applied to the change as it is shown, to one decimal place, so the word always matches the number beside it. The rules are:

Rounding

Job ad counts of 10,000 or more are shown to the nearest 100, counts from 100 to 9,999 to the nearest 10, and smaller counts as whole numbers. Labour force counts are shown to the nearest 100 people. Percentages and rates are shown to one decimal place. Changes are worked out from unrounded figures, so a change may not equal the difference between two rounded numbers.

Limits of the data

Job ads are not jobs. Many jobs are filled without an online ad, through word of mouth, internal moves, recruiters or employer websites, and one ad can be for several positions. Jobs and Skills Australia notes that online ads lean towards higher-skilled roles.

Seasonally adjusted and trend estimates are revised as new months arrive, so a recent month can change after it is first published.

Region and four-digit figures are averages of three months, so they react more slowly. Small numbers move around a lot: below 50 ads we do not describe a direction at all. Jobs and Skills Australia suppresses a few four-digit occupations as unreliable, and they are left out here too.

Region totals are not meant to add up to state totals, and the IVI regions are best-fit labour market areas, not council or electoral boundaries.

The labour force figures come from a sample survey and carry sampling error; month-to-month moves of a tenth of a point are often within that error. The ABS regional (SA4) labour force estimates are not in its current monthly release (Labour Force, Australia, Detailed, which carried them, has ceased), so region pages show job ads only.

Nothing here is a forecast. The numbers describe what has already happened.

Checks

Every number on the site is taken from the publishers' files, and every one is checked against those files before a page is published. The monthly briefing contains no number that cannot be traced to a release. A briefing stays as it was published, so later revisions by the publishers do not rewrite it.

Datasets in use