GovFuture Forum Online July 2023: Bureau of Labor Statistics Demo – NOVA Validation tool for the Occupational Requirements Survey

Join us at GovFuture Forum online for an in-depth demo of NOVA: A BLS Validation tool for the Occupational Requirements Survey from Anderson Freeman and Zach Gann.

The Occupational Requirements Survey (ORS) is a product of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). The ORS provides job-related information regarding physical demands; environmental conditions; education, training, and experience; as well as cognitive and mental requirements for jobs in the U.S. economy. The NCS-ORS Validation Application (NOVA) was developed to have an in-house validation application for ORS estimates. Validators are able to create assignments, enter validation remarks, and validate estimates at each production milestone. This is an improvement in our prior business process that required manual validation of estimates with an Excel file.

NOVA’s main screens are a Validation Dashboard page and an Estimate View page. On the Validation Dashboard page, users select the control group, estimate type, data element, characteristic, and Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code. The dashboard then visualizes estimate information for the current control group and the prior control group and shows the rate of change between them. It also displays if the change between the two groups exceeds 10% and is outside the 90% confidence interval, which is our threshold for further investigation. The Element View page allows the user to review any estimate from the Validation Dashboard in more detail (or independently on that screen). Depending on the estimate, NOVA will populate either stacked bar charts or a box and whisker plot. Clicking on either graph type will display all the observations feeding into that graph, with information on the ORS schedule and hit, the estimate value, job title, weight, and whether or not it is an overlap schedule.