Data integrity
Assembled, reconciled, and kept current.
Every figure in Futurescope comes from official statistical programs — no scraped postings, no synthetic records, no proprietary index. That is why it can be cited in an accreditation review, a grant application or a council packet. This page covers what the evidence base contains, how it is kept current, and what it can and cannot tell you.
What the evidence base covers
| Subject | What it covers | Geography | Depth |
|---|---|---|---|
| Industry employment & wages | Employment, establishments and average wages by industry and ownership sector | Nation to county | 12 years, quarterly |
| Occupational employment & wages | Employment and the full wage distribution, 10th to 90th percentile, by occupation | Nation, state, metro | 12 years, annual |
| Labor force & unemployment | Labor force, employment, unemployment and participation | State to county | Monthly |
| Payroll employment | Industry employment trends | Nation, state, metro | Monthly |
| Job openings & turnover | Openings, hires, quits and layoffs | Nation and state | Monthly |
| Unemployment claims | Initial and continued claims | State | Weekly, since 1986 |
| Employment projections | Ten-year occupation and industry outlook; state long- and short-term projections | Nation and state | Current cycle |
| Industry staffing patterns | Roughly 114,000 industry × occupation staffing cells, applied locally | Any region | Current |
| Skills & occupational content | Skills, knowledge, abilities, work activities, tasks and technology | Every occupation | Current release |
| Postsecondary completions | Completions by program, award level and student demographics; institutions and enrollment | Institution to nation | 12 years, annual |
| Program-to-occupation mapping | Links between instructional programs and the occupations they lead to | Every program | Current |
| Workforce demographics | Age, race and ethnicity, attainment, commuting and class of worker | County and metro | 5-year estimates |
| Worker flows & commuting | Hires, separations, turnover and earnings; home-to-work flows | County | Quarterly |
| Business establishments | Establishment counts by employment-size band | County | Annual |
| Regional income & output | Personal income, GDP by industry and total employment | County | Annual |
| Certifications & licensing | Certifications, state licenses and training providers | State and nation | Current |
Refresh
Kept current automatically.
Every series refreshes on the schedule it is published on, with nothing for your team to do — and the interface always shows the vintage of a figure, so you know how fresh it is before you cite it.
| Frequency | What refreshes |
|---|---|
| Nightly | Labor force and unemployment, payroll employment, job openings and turnover, unemployment claims |
| Weekly | Industry and occupational employment and wages, state projections, certifications and licensing |
| Monthly | Postsecondary completions, demographics, skills and occupational content, business establishments, regional income, national projections, staffing patterns, geography and classifications |
| Daily | Derived analytics — occupational similarity and modeled forecasts, rebuilt on the latest data |
Principles
Three rules behind every figure.
Official statistics only
Every figure comes from an official statistical program with a published methodology — employer records that cover nearly every establishment, and large probability surveys. No scraped postings, no synthetic records, no demo dataset.
Modeled is labeled
Some of the most useful figures are not officially published at the geography you need. Where we model one, it is labeled as modeled wherever it appears, never mixed into an official table, and the method is documented.
Provenance on screen
Every figure shows its release and vintage inside the platform, and narrative reports carry their notes into the exported document. Provenance is a screen, not a promise.
Limits we state up front
What this data cannot tell you.
Being explicit about limits is the point. Four you should know before a demo:
- Suppression is real. Small cells are withheld to protect respondent confidentiality. At county level, an occupation with few employers may simply not have a published wage. Futurescope shows the suppression rather than filling the hole with an estimate presented as fact.
- Openings are published nationally. Annual openings are only officially published at the national level. Local openings are modeled by applying the national openings rate to local occupational employment, and every view that shows the figure states that basis.
- Graduates move. A supply–demand balance compares people trained in a region against jobs in that region. Graduates migrate and enter unrelated work. It is a directional balance, not a count of unfilled jobs, and the interface says so wherever it appears.
- Official statistics lag. Industry employment runs about two quarters behind; occupational wages are annual; completions arrive roughly a year after the award year. Labor force and claims series are current. Nothing here is real-time, and no honest source of this kind is.
Ask how any figure was produced.
Pick any number in the demo and ask. You will get the vintage and the method on screen — not in a follow-up email.