The Patriot Spot

Welcome to another post in the Reference Book of the Week series. Once again, we are featuring a U.S. Government publication: the Occupational Outlook Handbook. It is officially known as U.S. Deparment of Labor Bulletin 2700. When it comes to career information, this item is a lifesaver. Most libraries, whether they are document depositories or not, will carry a copy of this publication. In brief, this book gives information on careers. If you want to know more about a particular job or career, how much it could pay, what education it would require, and its outlook in terms of employment, this is the place to go. The handbook is published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, an agency within the Department of Labor, which is “the principal fact-finding agency for the Federal Government in the broad field of labor economics and statistics” (from the BLS website).

The Robert R. Muntz Library has the “library edition” of the Occupational Outlook Handbook. This is basically a hardcover edition with stronger binding for institutional use. In plain English, we buy a stronger edition because we expect it to be heavily used. You could also buy the book in trade paperback through the Government Printing Office (GPO) online bookstore if you were so inclined. However, you are welcome to come to the library and use our copy. So, what’s in the book then?

• The table of contents: This can be your first point to start a search. It gives you a sense of how the book is organized. The OOC is organized by career groups (clusters) such as: management, business, and financial occupations; professional and related occupations; and service occupations. Each cluster is then further divided. For example, you would find education, training, library, and museum occupations under the professional and related occupations cluster. My job, librarian, would be in that section (on page 266).
• Each job entry features the following: a set of significant points to give you some quick facts about the job; nature of the work describing what the job typically does and entail; training, other qualifications, and advancement where you learn what kind of education and/or training is needed for that job; employment; job outlook; earnings; and related occupations which often tells you other careers that are similar or require some of the same skills. Finally, each entry gives a list of additional sources of information, mostly websites.
• Special features: the volume includes a series of special sections on topics such as: sources of career information; and finding and applying for jobs and evaluating offers. There is also a section labeled “Data for Occupations Not Studied in Detail.” The OOC does not cover in detail every single career. They claim to cover 9 out of 10 jobs in the U.S. (23). This additional section “presents summary data on 128 additional occupations, for which employment projections are prepared, but for which occupational information is not developed” (843).
• The book features an index in the back of the book, which allows readers to look up a specific job and find the page directly. There are some cross-references. For example, let’s say you want to be a pet groomer. You look it up and find there is no “pet groomer” listing. However, you look a bit more, and there is a listing for “groomers,” telling you then to go to page 485. It also tells you that for groomers, you need to see jobs under “animal care and service workers.” However, unlike other reference books, it does not make you take the extra step of finding the “see also” entry in the index; it gives you the page right away.

The Occupational Outlook Handbook is revised every two years. The library just acquired the new 2008-2009 edition. It is available in the library’s ready reference shelves (the shelving right behind the reference desk) under the call number HF 5381 .A1036.

Also, like a good number of government documents, the OOC is available online is freely available online. Here is the direct link to the OOC. The BLS site, which I linked above, also links to it under the “Publications” heading. The online version allows you to look at the career clusters, there is a link to the A-Z index, or you can search the publication by typing a term in the search box to get the information (this is what I usually do when I use the publication). The online resource also features some other helpful features such as a guide for teachers. In addition, I would like to note that you can find other valuable labor resources through the BLS website such as information on the Consumer Price Index (CPI), productivity, and employment. If you want to see where many news anchors get their labor numbers or want to know what exactly is the CPI, the BLS site is a good place to look.

Recently, a good number of students have visited the library or contacted us looking for some business information. The students tell us that they need to choose a company and then compare that company’s financial information to the industry average. Students can do this in a few ways. Here are two of them:

• They can use Industry Norms and Key Business Ratios. The call number for this series of books is HF 5681 .R25 I 525, and they are kept in the library’s reference area. These volumes contain ratios for many industries, which you can look up by SIC Codes. However, the books do not list all industries.
• Students can also use the Mergent Online database. Find Mergent on the library’s website by clicking on [Databases by Subject]. From there, click on the link for [Business and Technology]. Finally, click on [Company Information]. Mergent is on that list. Once on Mergent’s front page, click on[Enter Mergent] to get to the database itself. The following steps then are to make a custom comparison report.
  1. Start by finding the company’s SIC or NAICS code by doing a search on the Company Name or Ticker Symbol. Just type the name of the company, or the ticker symbol if you know it, on the small search box.
  2. Return to the main Mergent search screen and do a search on the SIC or NAICS code using the “2 Classification” section. If you are only interested in searching for companies on the US exchanges, click on the checkbox next to “US exchanges only” located below the company search box.
  3. Click on the option that says [Click Here to Add all companies from this search to add all the companies from this search (excludes private company results)]. right above the list of companies. The companies will now be added to the Company Analysis List.
  4. Towards the upper right of the screen you should see a section that reads [Company Analysis List (expand).] If you hold the mouse over expand, the list of companies will popup along with some options. Click on the [Create Comparison Report] link.
  5. A pop up window will appear with all of the companies checked. In the second section, choose a Category, then a Sub-Category, and then click on the [Add Report Item] button. Add as many items as you need.
  6. If necessary, choose the years that the report needs to cover.
  7. **IMPORTANT** Click on the checkbox next to “Include average in heading” which appears below the list of report items.
  8. Click on the [Create Report] button at the bottom. Another window will pop up with the financial information you requested for each of the companies listed. Above the numbers for each category is the peer average.

If you need to know more about SIC Codes, you can look them up on this site from the Department of Labor here. You may also come across NAICS Codes; find them at the Census Bureau, which also has a tool if you need to convert SIC Codes to NAICS and back, go here.