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The BLS, NPR, and Me

·131 words·1 min
Asa Hess-Matsumoto
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Asa Hess-Matsumoto
A little bit about you

A couple months ago, I pitched a story idea (or rather, a series of related questions) to National Public Radio’s (NPR) “The Indicator” podcast. I wanted to know…

  1. How the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics calculated their estimations for projected jobs growth over such long time horizons.
  2. How accurate these estimations have proven to be retroactively.

I was curious to learn how confident we could be in the BLS’s estimates for ~30% job growth in cybersecurity despite a growing amount of evidence to the contrary.

A few weeks after that, NPR’s Darian Woods reached out to me and we got to speaking more on the topic. That conversation - and the subsequent research involved - ended up being the subject of one of “The Indicator’s” recent episodes, now available to listen: