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What I'm looking for something like this: http://www.bls.gov/cew/ew07fig20.pdf

For those that can't see it, the second page of the PDF has a map of Employment density within manufacturing by county, 2007 (employees per square mile).

But what I'm looking for needs to have

  • Recent data; preferably 2014-2015 but nothing older than 2010
  • Data for each major occupation group
  • Actual numbers, not just a plain image
  • Preferably data in a GIS format but a table, CSV, or Excel file will work

They never specified exactly how small a unit of area they were looking for but it needed to be smaller than a county.

My immediate need is only for a few counties though data for the entire state may be useful. The counties in question do not touch state lines.

I've been able to find tables of data giving how many employees there are in a county broken out by industry but not how many employees in an industry there are per unit of area. It seems like it ought to exist, the Bureau of Labor Statistics did do that PDF above after all, but I'm unable to find it.

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    If you already have the occupation numbers per county, you could divide that by the area of the county in sq. miles or sq. feet.
    – Maksim
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 17:50
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    You may want to cross post here: opendata.stackexchange.com
    – juturna
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 18:14
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    Have you tried census.gov, and/or American Fact Finder? You generally have to get the data table and join it to the geographic file (block, tract, group, etc). Not all data is available at all levels, but unless it's a very sparsely inhabited area, I imagine they're all smaller than county level.
    – recurvata
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 19:10
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    I don't think that collecting data on the square foot is really possible over any wide area. That type of spatial unit doesn't make sense to me for this, unless you have some other level data and you are using ancillary data like land cover or land use to break out the areas of the that contain land uses that are likely to contain certain jobs. Square mile could exist somewhere, but the example you give is prob just using the area of the county to get density. This still doesn't allow you to make any conclusions on WHERE those people are in the county.
    – Tangnar
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 19:12
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    We have a couple questions like this here, for instance gis.stackexchange.com/questions/107286 Your best resource might be contacting the local Workforce Center. How big an area are you looking at - nationwide, states, group of counties? Two things to note: First, the kind of density map you're talking about may only be able to be generated from point employment locations and worker counts with an interpolation method (so, a heatmap). Second, I would expect fairly close correlation between population density and this employment map depending on data scale.
    – Chris W
    Commented Apr 15, 2015 at 19:56

4 Answers 4

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Added per request...

Have you tried census.gov, and/or American Fact Finder? You generally have to get the data table and join it to the geographic file (block, tract, group, etc). Not all data is available at all levels, but unless it's a very sparsely inhabited area, I imagine they're all smaller than county level.

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My manager found the Smart Location Database by the EPA and it includes, among other things, gross employment density (jobs per acre) on unprotected land. It breaks it up by categories like Retail, Office, Industrial, etc. instead of the BLS categories in my question.

I still plan to do more searching with the suggestions above and will let you know how that turns out.

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The Zip Code Business Pattern Data from the Census Bureau would be one place to look: census.gov/econ/cbp

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I think this is what you're looking for

https://lehd.ces.census.gov/data/#lodes

https://onthemap.ces.census.gov/

This provides employment data by area down to the census block level.

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