Assignment 3

Trystan Liu (3698877)

2025/10/28

Slide 1 - AU Labour Market — Using ABS (Aug 2025)

Audience:Early-career job seekers in Melbourne (like me); University careers staff and tech HR.

Goal:Use ABS Labour Force (reference period Aug 2025) to assess current opportunities/risks.

Data source: Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) — Labour force, Australia: August 2025.
https://www.abs.gov.au/statistics/labour/employment-and-unemployment/labour-force-australia/aug-2025

Release: 18 Sep 2025 AEST (ABS).

Project repo:https://github.com/ZiyingLiu66/Data-Visualisation---Assignment-3-Storytelling-with-Open-Data.git

Slide 2 - Data & Methodology (Scope & Definitions)

Scope: National monthly Labour Force Survey (ABS).

Metrics used: employment-to-population ratio (%, SA), unemployment rate (%, SA), employed persons (’000, SA), underemployment rate (%, SA), monthly hours worked (million hours, SA).

What is plotted

  1. Seasonally adjusted (default). Monthly series only; trend lines are not plotted. All MoM/YoY comments are based on SA.
  2. X-axis. ABS reference month, tick every 3 months, label in “Mon YYYY” (e.g., Sep 2025) to avoid confusion with day of month.

Revision notes: ABS uses concurrent seasonal adjustment and demographic re-benchmarking, so the past months can be revised; please interpret small monthly changes with caution!

Integrity & readability: correlation ≠ causation, avoid interpreting conclusions from short-term waves. Readability in design: clear units, uniform caliber, etc.

Slide 3 - Plot 1: Employment-to-population ratio

Slide 4 - Plot 2: Unemployment-to-population ratio

Slide 5 - Plot3: Employed Data

Slide 6 - Plot4: Employment Rate: By Gender

Slide 7 - Plot 5:Underemployment Rate:By Gender

Slide 8 - Plot6: Monthly hours worked in all jobs

Slide 9: Key Insights & Actions

Summary (latest month)

  • Employment-to-population: 64.0% (MoM +0.0 ppt, YoY -0.4 ppt)
  • Unemployment: 4.5% (MoM +0.2 ppt, YoY +0.5 ppt)
  • Employed persons: 14 640 ’000 (MoM 15 ’000, YoY 190 ’000)
  • Monthly hours: 1 986.8 million (MoM +9.4m, YoY +28.0m)
  • Hours per worker: 135.7
  • Gender gaps: Employment -6.9 ppt, Underemployment +1.6 ppt

Insights:

  1. Hiring against the wind: Overall, the employment rate not increased in the past year, while the unemployment rate has slightly rised, the overall competition has been intensified.

  2. Part-Time Drag: Workload still increasing, average working hours per person lower than the standard full-time, indicating that part-time/temporary are still common.

  3. Gap, Not Divergence: There has sight gender difference in employment rates, but the overall trends are almost the same, indicating that there have been no social events that have led to divergent employment curves for men and women.

Slide 10: Ethics and References

Achknowledgement

We acknowledge the Woi-wurrung and Boon-wurrung language groups of the Kulin Nation as the Traditional Owners of the lands on which we learn and work in Melbourne. We pay our deepest respects to Elders past and present.

We also thank the Australian Bureau of Statistics for providing open, publicly accessible data used in this project — specifically Labour force, Australia: August 2025. ABS content is generally available under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0).

Ethics & integrity

  1. Honesty and restraint: These plots only show “what happened”, not “why it happened”.
  2. Transparency and reproducibility: All figures were generated by me with R. The complete code and data processing steps are publicly available in the shared open source GitHub repository.
  3. Respect: The result shows the differences between genders, without making over-judgments. More detailed analysis requires more cautious data and methods.

References