Johnson & Wilson's The 13 High-Paying Jobs You Don’t Want to Have

This is a lot of I/O and personality a little bit of stats. But it does demonstrate correlation, percentiles, and it is interactive.

For this article from Time, Johnson and Wilson used participant score on a very popular vocational selection tool, the Holland Inventory (sometimes called the RAISEC) and participant salary information to see if there is a strong relationship between salary and personality-job fit. There is not.

How to use in class:



-Show your students what a weak correlation looks like when expressed via scatter plot. Seriously. I spend a lot of time looking for examples for teaching statistics. And there are all sorts of significant positive and negative correlation examples out there. But good examples of non-relationships are a lot rarer.

-If you teach I/O, this fits nicely into personality-job fit lecture. If you don't teach I/O but are a psychologist, this still applies to your field and may introduce your students to the field of I/O.

-This example is interactive in a few ways. Johnson and Wilson got this data from a previous Time article that included the RAISEC survey. The survey, via Time, also returns the respondents' results. It makes the example more self relevant, and also gives your students a bit of vocational advice.

Additionally, there is a search feature so that you can look up a job title and find the personality-job fit percentile for a given job. Or, you can cursor over any of the dots on the scatter plot to get the job title, salary, and personality-job fit for that job title.

You can also use the search feature to look up particular job titles.

-Median: The scatter plot includes the median fit score on the x-axis.

-Percentiles: The article contains information on what percentage of people experience greater person:job fit than given occupations, thus demonstrating percentiles.

This list demonstrates percentiles (but doesn't use the word percentiles!) for the highest paid, worst fitting jobs.