Here’s an interesting Sunday morning musing.   I was taking a look through the 2017 Employment Brief and took a moment to look closer at the above tables on page 5.  I noted that there are rather huge differences in income for various positions and I started wondering what explanation there might be.

Before jumping to conclusions it is important to recognize that there could be a good story behind why these differences exist such as experience levels, differences in roles, education ,etc.

With that said, I was rather surprised I hadn’t noticed it before, I suspect largely because the tables are sorted by total filled jobs which makes it harder to line up the occupational categories.

This raises a whole wealth of questions about what story the underlying data tells.  Do we have it annually?  Can we track the progression of Bermudian incomes vs. non-Bermudian incomes for various roles?  Can we get more granularity on details that give us a more complete picture like average ages, sub categories within roles, etc?  There is alot of potential information here so I’ve written the stats department to ask where this information is sourced from as it isn’t available in the Employment Survey Tabulations I’ve been collecting over the years.

To give you a better idea of what I’m seeing, here’s the table realigned alphabetically.  Let’s remember, there could be many reasons for this so let’s not jump to conclusions, but it is definitely worth more explanation.  I’ve added a column covering the difference in non-Bermudian vs. Bermudian as well.  Only in the case of “Personnel specialists” do Bermudians make more on average.

Here it is in chart form as well.

Let’s hope the excellent and helpful staff of the Stats department (who in my opinion aren’t appreciated enough for the important role they do) can come back with some good information to dig into further.