What is seasonal employment?

Michigan has snowy winters and sunny summers. Because of this, some jobs are seasonal. For example, beach lifeguards work in the summer, while snow plow operators work in the winter. A seasonal job is only available for part of the year.

A person with a seasonal job may qualify for unemployment benefits while they search for off-season work.

We can look at the occupations of people who file for unemployment benefits over time to learn which occupations are seasonal.

About the application and data

This application will help the user explore which occupations in Michigan are seasonal.

It uses a report by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration on the characteristics of people who file for unemployment benefits. The report, ETA 203, can be found here [link].

According to the U.S. Department of Labor Employment and Training Administration:

The ETA 203 report provides information, by state and for the Nation, about the characteristics of Unemployment Insurance (UI) claimants. This data is useful in describing the population of claimants and determining how that population changes over time and under various conditions.

Seasonality of occupations

Construction and Extraction is a seasonal occupation. Let’s explore this.

First, what’s the distribution of the number of unemployment claimants in the Construction and Extraction occupation?

summary(occ2024$`Construction and Extraction`)

##    Min. 1st Qu.  Median    Mean 3rd Qu.    Max. 
##    1925    2236    3473    6357   10524   14597

Which months have the most and least unemployment claimants? It looks like August has the least claimants and February has the most claimants in the Construction and Extraction occupation.

# Least claimants
dplyr::filter(occ2024, occ2024$`Construction and Extraction` == min(occ2024$`Construction and Extraction`))$month

## [1] "August"

# Most claimants
dplyr::filter(occ2024, occ2024$`Construction and Extraction` == max(occ2024$`Construction and Extraction`))$month

## [1] "February"

The application

This is an application [link] made so that the user can explore which occupations are most seasonal in Michigan without dealing directly with the data.

The user can use the drop-down selection to choose an occupation. Example:

The application will then render a chart of how many unemployment claimants there were in that occupation by month in 2024.

This application could help users with choosing an occupation, or could help users better understand seasonal occupations in Michigan.