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Who Does What?


Who does what and how many do it? 
Probably you have an  idea but haven’t seen just how many people do what. The Bureau of Labor Statistics knows, and they make this information available to everyone. Occupations are divided into 22 categories.  For example, there are the categories of “legal systems” and “management occupations.”  At the website below you can get even the number of elementary school teachers doing special education.  What we give below is the gross numbers for the big categories. Below you will see the category, the number of workers in each category, and the percentage of each category to the whole.  First note that just over 142 million people are included in this 2017 table. 



Note that fully 6% of all workers are in the health profession, while another 2.9% are healthcare support workers.  That’s just about 9% of the population.  Education takes up another 6% of all workers.  And so on.  The police are included with the protective service jobs, and these comprise 2.4% of the population.  This indicates about one in every forty people are protecting us in some way.

Enjoy the data.  BTW, under computer occupations, a further breakdown reveals there are more than 800,000 programmers.  And even with that huge number, there is also a shortage. 
 You can find all this information at the BLS website. The full data spreadsheets is at https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_stru.htm. It’s a big file with almost 500,000 lines. 

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