Lightcast offers wage estimates for each USA profile based on the person's location, current job title, and years of experience.
These wage estimates are primarily an indicator of the locations and types of jobs (occupations) that people are working in as opposed to the relative salary level they receive within those job type and location combinations. These wage estimates are not suitable for comparing individuals within a single combination of location and job type (occupation).
These wage estimates do not take into account any individual wage differentials that may arise from:
attending different types of institutions (e.g. ivy league schools versus rural community colleges)
taking different types or levels of education (e.g. certificates, bootcamps, bachelors, graduate degrees, etc.)
previously working in a high-profile region and/or at a high-profile employer and/or in a high-profile field
any other individual characteristics that may contribute to salary differentials within a particular type of job
Cautions for Comparisons and Benchmarking
Education and training providers (and/or the systems, associations, and governments that support and fund them) may want to use estimated wage data on profiles of their graduates to compare and/or benchmark to profiles of graduates from other providers.
Similarly, employers (and/or the associations and government entities that support and regulate them) may want to use estimated wage data on profiles of their workers to compare and/or benchmark to workers at other organizations.
In any such comparisons, the primary reasons that an educator, employer, and/or other entity might observe higher wages on their profiles of interest compared to another set of profiles will be due to:
a higher percentage of their profiles working in higher paying occupations than the comparison/benchmark set (e.g. financial services versus food services)
a higher percentage of their profiles working in higher paying regions (e.g. a metropolitan area versus in rural communities)
a higher percentage of their profiles having more years of experience in their occupations than the comparison/benchmark set
As such, any attempts to compare or benchmark sets of profiles will only yield insights into the comparative mix of job types, locations, and years of experience for profiles, and not about their relative salary levels within those job types or locations arising from other individual characteristics (e.g. where they went to school, areas/types of study, previous experience in a high-profile region, company, and/or area/role, etc.).
Methodology
Lightcast's wage estimates for each profile are calculated based on:
what occupation the learner is currently working in
their years of experience in that occupation
the location/region they are currently working in
Data sources include:
Lightcast's county-level labor market data, which is built from OES, adjusted by QCEW, ACS and other federal and state sources
A Lightcast proprietary model (based on actual salary observations) for how wages within occupations vary based on years of experience
Lightcast currently provides estimated wages at the 25th, 50th, and 75th percentiles for each profile to enable users to evaluate wage ranges and probabilities.