The U.S. Census Bureau has released version 3 of LED On the Map, a web-based tool for analyzing labor market and demographic statistics covering 48 states (including Virginia).  On the Map generates reports tailored to a specific geographic area that is selected by the user and provides a great resource for creating project-specific data sets.  Information on employment and commuting patterns is tailored directly to the area(s) of interest, based on employers’ required ES-202 annual tax reporting of all employees, as collected by partner state labor market information agencies. 

The valuable advantage of this tool is the statistical technique developed by the Census Bureau that protects the confidentiality of the data and correlates it to geographic areas.  The technique allows users to access detailed residential and employment data that might otherwise be suppressed for areas with small populations (or below the county level), which provides a unique and more detailed capacity to analyze worker commuting patterns and labor market trends.  The On the Map interface is helpful for collecting information about larger regional trends as well, allowing users to add and subtract counties from the area of analysis with ease.

The main page for the On the Map website can be found at: http://lehdmap3.did.census.gov/ .  This page includes a quick tutorial and other self-training for how to use the different features of the On the Map interface.  Although the web prompts may not seem user friendly at first glance (read the tutorial first!), the basic screen shows a map on the right and several tabs on the left that allows the user to specify the characteristics of interest for their analysis.  First, the user selects the area or region to analyze.  The user can select the boundaries of the geographic area by several methods: 

• by administrative boundaries (counties, workforce investment areas, census tracts, etc.)
• by creating a target area with several tools, including: ‘free-hand’ drawing a line around the target area, as well as defining a radius from a selected point  or line (i.e. within 50 miles of Virginia Tech, or, within 10 miles of a 50 mile long stretch of Interstate 81)
• several other options depending on the purpose of the analysis (such as disaster relief).

After selecting the region, the user can then change several variables to produce different reports about the region.  The reports and maps are generated in standardized ‘pdf’ reports showing the results of the Census Bureau’s statistical analysis.  On the Map allows for several types of reports, including:

• Analysis of worker characteristics, including industry sector, salary range, and age of workers.
• Analysis of worker commuting patterns, including reports for both ‘labor shed’ (for instance, where workers are commuting from to work at a job in Blacksburg) and ‘commute shed’ (where Blacksburg’s employed residents commute to for their jobs).
• For the commuting patterns reports, On the Map also generates a map with dots representing the location of workers in the region which can be a powerful visual demonstration of regional labor market trends.  

The OnTheMap e-learning tool has is now available
At http://lehd.did.census.gov/led/datatools/elearning/OnTheMap/player.html

In 22 minutes, the course demonstrates how to do basic analyses using
OnTheMap with five years of employment and segmented age, earnings and
industry data for local and regional areas in Virginia.