January 4, 2016

Seek and ye shall be disappointed

There’s another Herald story about incomes based on job ads at Seek.co.nz.

Data released by job search company Seek shows outside of consultancy work roles linked to the building industry were paid the most last year and were some of the few sectors to see decent pay rises.

The average salary for the construction industry is now $94,580, a boost of 5 per cent on 2013 while engineers earned an average of $92,595

Stats NZ data isn’t quite as up to date, but the NZ Income Survey, in June, found average weekly earnings in the construction industry to be $1096 (go here, and select ‘Construction’ from ‘Industry’), up about 1% from 2013 (though 5% from 2014). If you assume a full-time job with holidays, that’s $57,000 per year.

I don’t know how much of this is due to different definitions and how much is due to the Seek jobs being non-representative, but it’s possible for anyone who really cares to find out exactly what the Stats NZ number means, and that’s not true for the Seek number.

 

 

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Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »