Drag through two centuries of work.

How to read the dots

• A solid dot is a count from the US census or the Bureau of Labor Statistics for exactly that year.
• A hollow dot is a cited estimate: a historian's or agency's figure, not a direct count. Pin the job to read how it was made.
• A small grey dot is a job that existed but has no figure for that year. The gap stays a gap.
• A dashed ring is a job that was not a job yet.

What the dots cannot tell you

The record is thin before 2000: 1,403 of the 1,652 figures for those years are cited estimates, and most jobs were counted at most once a decade. Older counts often cover a broader category than today's job (a census "stenographers, typists, and secretaries" line, say), and each figure says so where it does.

A dot glides from one year to the next only when both figures are on the same basis: the same source, category and method. Where the basis changes, it fades and reappears instead, so a move is never a trend the sources do not support. Workers are never added up across jobs.

Go further

• Find your own job on the homepage
• Browse all jobs
• Data stories from the record
• How the dataset is built