About a week ago a friend remarked to me that a lot of the IT workers he knew were military veterans. We wondered first whether this was true--that is, is it the case that with a high chance if you're talking with an IT guy, you're talking with a military vet--and we also wondered what might cause this.
Easy question #1 can be answered with the March Current Population Survey (CPS). The March CPS is an annual survey of about 60,000 households, which, according to the data I'm looking at from IPUMS, leads to about 200,000 total respondents each year.
Using this data, I calculate, for each occupation category, the proportion of respondents who report themselves as military veterans. Overall, approximately 7.83% of the respondents used in these calculations are veterans.
These proportions are presented in the following collapsible bar chart. There are 23 occupation categories, each containing particular occupations (there are over 500 different occupations in these data). Click on a occupation category to toggle its subcategories.
To answer my friend's question, let's see... where would "an IT guy" be? Probably what we had in mind is in the "Installation, Maintenance, and Repair" category, maybe "Electronic ... equipment installers and repairers". Those occupations do hover around 20% veteran, suggesting that our thoughts might be somewhat accurate.
Poking around some more does suggest that being a military veteran changes occupational choices later in life in ways that are really quite intuitive given the kinds of human capital obtained while in service. This is interesting in light of media attention surrounding the purported lack of employability of military veterans, e.g. Fortune, CNN, Citizen-Times. Maybe some veterans are able to earn higher wages by exploiting their military-earned human capital.
Methods and data sources
The data was obtained from IPUMS. In this analysis, I restrict to the years 2003 to 2010, over which the Census occupation codes remained constant. I also restrict attention to people asked about their veteran status (which requires the person to be over 15 or 17, depending on the year). About 32% of the remaining sample does not have an occupation category, almost always because they are not in the labor force (being an unemployed new worker also leads to not having an occupation category, but unemployed workers do have an occupation category specified).
IT is under Computer and mathematical. Network and computer systems administrators, Computer support specialists, Database Administrators, are all common job titles in IT.
ReplyDeleteI see. So an IT guy isn't much more likely to be a veteran after all! (Maybe a little more likely than other occupations, hovering around 8 to 11%.)
DeleteI do think the phrase "IT guy" means different things to different people. Like "economist' probably makes you think of the stock market, no?