Lightcast's Global data is designed to best enable international comparisons. As with the creation of the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy to normalize different global occupation standards, Lightcast provides data in the global tool for standardized local Lightcast Administrative Area's within each Country.

The goal of the Lightcast Administrative Area's (LAA's for short) is to create a unified geographic mapping of data that corresponds with the local governmental definitions of those area's.

Talent Analyst uses the Metropolitan Area definitions of the Lightcast Administrative Area framework to filter and display localized data. Since official 'metropolitan areas' are defined on national or regional levels, we utilize Lightcast Administrative Areas to ensure that we're comparing similar metropolitan areas globally.

Metropolitan definitions are based on government defined regions, in most cases coming direct from local authorities. For example, US Metros are based on the Office of Management and Budget's Metropolitan Statistical Areas. The table below demonstrates the breadth by country.

The geographical locations associated with our global dataset are defined by Lightcast Administrative Areas, or LAAs. These are geocodes, or statistical divisions of a country for ease of analysis. They align with local geocode standards in each country that Lightcast maintains data for, for example the NUTS area codes across the European Union, and the FIPS subdivisions of the United States.

Metropolitan definitions are based on government defined regions, in most cases coming direct from local authorities. Lightcast has a threshold in each country to maintain a manageable number of metropolitan areas. Refer to the table above to determine the specific local definitions and the threshold in each country.

No. Global metros do not exhaustively cover a country's area. Smaller regions areas are included in national estimates but not specifically addressed within the "metropolitan" areas of the global tool.