I am here in Toronto working and what do I find? An article on a Canadian bank that is cited for poor statistics in the creation of a job-quality metric that shows a drastic drop which is heavily reported in the media. An article in the Financial Post “Why CIBC’s so-called job-quality index just doesn’t measure up” spoke of things that we see in Lean Six Sigma. Poorly formed metrics and index values that sound great but are meaningless.
In this article they provide excellent reasons why the index metric is poor. It only uses three components, while the Statistics Canada, a government statistics organization, has shown that there are over 9 components to job satisfaction that should be considered.
My favorite consideration is that the CIBC index indicates that job growth is found in the industries with the lowest wages. The StatsCanada group has recently published that the actual recent job growth was in higher wage positions (>$30/hr) although they were in industries that have a high number of lower wage jobs. The use of the average wage misrepresents the job growth, so why not use the actual wages when examining the growth. The actual data is publicly available. How often do we see averages used in reporting that actually misrepresent the true message? Too often, in my view.
Consider reading the original article. It is written by a statistician so you will find it well written. (right!)