While a bit dated (2011), this interactive demonstrates the tremendous changes that have taken place in American jobs over the past 50 years. It's also a really creative approach to displaying this data that econ, personal finance and math teacher alike will enjoy working into their lessons. 

Here's what you see when you go to this visualization:

Some orientation about how to utilize this interactive:

• You can toggle between SECTOR, GENDER and AGE (upper left of the chart)
• The slider bar on the bottom allows you to move a year at a time to see how the employment picture changes by industry. 
• The shaded people in each sector indicates the number of people employed in that sector in a given year, while those that are not shaded in represent the peak volume for that sector. For example, in 1960, the number of people employed in the Farm, Harvest and Catch sector peaked in that year. 

Lots of different ways that you could utilize this interactive to engage your students and develop their analytical thinking. Here are a few ideas: 

• One idea is to have students use this information to populate a spreadsheet to look at the data across the decades. By inputting the data for 1960, 1970, 1980, 1990, 2000 and 2010 and then common-sizing it by calculating the percentage of jobs that each sector represents for each of these years, it becomes more apparent about which sectors have gained and which have contracted. This would be a great partner activity with one manipulating the interactive while the other inputs the numbers in the spreadsheet. For math teachers, it also hammers home the point that looking at the gross numbers (# of employees) only tells half the story and that a more valid trend analysis would be to calculate percentage of employees working in each sector. 
• Here's some questions that will require your students to explore this interactive (while in SECTOR mode):
  • Which industry sector is closest to it's peak employment level in 2010? 
  • Which sectors have fewer people working in it in 2011 compared to 1960? 
  • What is the unemployment percentage in 2011 (Number of people unemployed divided by size of U.S. Labor force in that year)? 
    • How does the compare with the unemployment rate announced the past Friday (September 7th)?
  • How has the number of people employed in the Financial Activities sector changed in the last 50 years? Self-Employed sector? 
• When in GENDER mode (upper left)
  • What percentage of the workforce was male compared to female in 1960? What were the percentages in 2011? 
  • What would your headline for the analysis you did in the question above? 
  • What do you think accounted for this change over the past 50 years? 
  • If you click on the red flag in the interactive on the Female chart you will see another good question to ask your students:  

Have other ideas on how you might use this interactive?  Share it in the FinLit Fanatics group (must be an educator to participate). 

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Looking for other new ideas to bring to your classroom this year? Brian Page shares a bunch in this NGPF Podcast. 

Looking for more interactives? We have almost 40 of them in our Interactive Library. 

About the Author

Tim Ranzetta

Tim's saving habits started at seven when a neighbor with a broken hip gave him a dog walking job. Her recovery, which took almost a year, resulted in Tim getting to know the bank tellers quite well (and accumulating a savings account balance of over $300!). His recent entrepreneurial adventures have included driving a shredding truck, analyzing executive compensation packages for Fortune 500 companies and helping families make better college financing decisions. After volunteering in 2010 to create and teach a personal finance program at Eastside College Prep in East Palo Alto, Tim saw firsthand the impact of an engaging and activity-based curriculum, which inspired him to start a new non-profit, Next Gen Personal Finance.