The most disproportionately popular job in every state

Updated

Some jobs are disproportionately concentrated in certain states.

Fashion designers flock to New York, Texas has an outsize share of petroleum engineers, and Floridians are much more likely to be motorboat operators than are other Americans.

We made a map that shows the most over-represented job in each state, among jobs with at least 1,000 people employed, using the Bureau of Labor Statistics' recently released May 2015 "Occupational Employment Statistics." Each state has far more of these jobs per capita than the nation as a whole.

We'll discuss the methodology later. First check out the map:

occupation location quotients map 2015
occupation location quotients map 2015

Business Insider/Andy Kiersz, data from Bureau of Labor Statistics

These are not the most common jobs in these states — that map would be very boring, since the most common job in 40 states is "retail salesperson," the most common job in the country.

Instead, this map shows jobs that are disproportionately concentrated in each state. For example, in New York, there are about 7,440 fashion designers, out of a total of 8,984,890 employed people. So fashion designers account for about 8.3 out of every 10,000 jobs in New York.

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In the U.S. as a whole, there are about 19,040 fashion designers out of a total of 137,896,660 employed people. So about 1.4 of every 10,000 jobs in America are in fashion design.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics calls the ratio of these two rates the location quotient for a job in a particular area. The location quotient of fashion designers in New York is 8.3 divided by 1.4, which equals about 6.0. That is, there are about 6 times as many fashion designers per 10,000 total employed people in New York as in the U.S. as a whole.

The map shows the job in each state with the highest location quotient, among jobs with at least 1,000 people employed. These jobs exist in each state at much higher rates than in the country as a whole.

Check out the most Googled jobs across the country:

Most Googled Jobs in the Country
Most Googled Jobs in the Country

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