Manpower Search

For this activity I searched Madison, WI, Oak Park, IL, which is my hometown, and Seattle, WA, which is a city I would potentially like to live in someday. I found similarities between each city, but my hometown and Seattle, WA were more similar.

Madison, WI: Madison has only two permanent job listings, yet overall with a 25 mile radius only 15 job postings showed up. The rest were contract jobs primarily consisting of manufacturing and production jobs.  The amount of previous education and technology skills needed for jobs such as the jobs are probably minimal and offer to teach training that you would need to know. Overall there were very few choices residing in the Madison area.

Oak Park, IL: Next I searched for Oak Park, IL, which is where I am from. Because the distance was set to 25 miles the 97 job listings were from all over the Chicagoland area and Chicago itself. I was not surprised because my hometown is one of the suburbs bordering Chicago and there were bound to be a large portion of job listings from the city. Although there were still more temporary/contract jobs then permanent jobs, there were overall more permanent jobs. Many of the jobs were still manufacturing or construction jobs requiring minimal experience, yet there were also more telecommunication and customer service office jobs in the listings most likely because it’s closer to a large city. Business and tourism are major factors in Chicago jobs that require more basic technology skills and in other cases more advanced skills.

Seattle, WA: The last city I searched was Seattle, Washington because I would love to live there at some point in my life. The results were very similar to my hometown because Seattle is a large city like Chicago, but at a smaller scale. There were only 26 job postings, but many were customer service, and human resources jobs. The ratio of permanent jobs to non-permanent jobs was about the same and the jobs appeared to require the same basic technology skills needed for an office job.