Preview: Visualizing Transitions to the Workforce

The Iowa Department of Education and Iowa Workforce Development have teamed together to track students from community college into the workforce. While we’ve looked at returns to degree and in-state retention rate, we wanted to see where kids were working. In short, we looked at majors and tracked them into the industry. We aggregated majors into 17 groups (left) and 20 industries (right).  In order to easily display the information I opted for a Circos display.

Student Majors (Left) to Industry (Right)

It seems complex, but simpler than a table. A few notable items pop out. College parallel (those originally meant to transfer to a four-year college)  is the largest set of majors. As such, college parallel is the largest source of workers for each industry. In many instances, college parallel composes half of the labor supply from community colleges. Health is the second largest group of majors, most of whom end up working in the health industry.

We’ll be releasing a full report with the methodology in a couple of months. I also wrote a script the transforms a traditional table into a format acceptable to Circos (I didn’t use Circos’ built-in function) which I’ll post in the future.