Percentiles, bee swarm plots, Bureau of Labor Statistics data...so many lessons in one interactive chart.

There are so many ways to use this tool:

Nathan Yau's Flowing Data is one of those websites I check every few days for statistical inspiration. He shares the work of others and his own, including this interactive bee swarm plot that illustrates salaries for various jobs.

A jitter plot. On the Y axis is annual salary. Each dot represents a different occupation.

The bee plot, with the cursor of Psychology Teachers.
https://flowingdata.com/2025/09/09/salary-and-occupation-2024/

There are many ways to use this in stats class:

1. At some point, you should talk about career exploration with your students.

2. Statistics students should be learning about modern data visualizations like this jitter plot, aka bee swarm plot.

3. If you cursor over any dot, you can see the 25th and 75th percentile scores and n size for that occupation's salary.

4. The size of each circle corresponds to the n size. Which I love because jitter plots do a great job of illustrating variability in a data set. However, each data point here represents an average from a group of people with that type of job. The size of the dot helps you see both the sample size for that dot as well as a visual cue to tell us how many Americans have a given job.

5. The data is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and uses BLS job categories. The government collects and shares gobs and gobs of data that can be used in countless ways. The color of the dot corresponds to the job category.

Comments

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