Boston Employment Trends - Tableau

GOALS AND PURPOSE

This dashboard is meant to accompany a (fictitious) Boston news article about the state of the city three years post-pandemic. In particular the article dealt with salary and headcount trends across the city as a whole and didn't focus on one department over others.

The salary data presented here is intended for public consumption. The reading public would comprise a diverse audience with widely varying levels of interest, prior knowledge, and engagement. One group of readers would expect the dashboard to summarize high level metrics. A second group, the more curious, would want to explore the data unsupervised. And a third group--satisfied with the article text alone--wouldn't engage with the dashboard.

THE DESIGN

This dashboard caters to both the first and second groups. As the first group is larger, two thirds of the space is given over to presenting key facts. Even though the dataset contained 10 years of data, I decided that the summary section should focus on the latest data (from 2022). Given world events though, everyone would ask--how does the situation now compare with pre-pandemic times (2019).

As for key metrics and dimensions, this audience would want to know:

• How many people have city jobs? (headcount)
• Where are they working? (job sectors)
• Who's making the most money? (avg. total compensation)
• What do city jobs pay at a minimum? (avg. base pay)

For the second group, I have an exploratory section at the right, so that the curious among the audience can track how these metrics have trended over the last decade for the sector or sectors of their choice.