Methodology for "Army vs. Air Force vs. Navy: How Branch of Military Services Affects One's Career"
The "Army vs. Air Force vs. Navy" data visualization base all analysis on graduates from service academies. The reason for this is that LinkedIn, through their "school" search criteria makes it possible to gather data for service academy graduates, but there is no other direct way to gather data for all military officers. I want to continue this research for the enlisted community, but felt that the data would be different enough that it was important to separate the data first. The final result of this initial data can be viewed here.
I grouped the data around several key areas related to a post-military career.
- Industry: I looked at all 147 LinkedIn classified Industries, except for "Military." This was the easiest way to look at Army, Navy and Air Froce Officers on LinkedIn who are no longer on Active Duty. The 147 categories did not provide as much insight, so I created my own subset of categories in order to extract higher-level takeaways. I was unable to find any official guidance on the best way to create these subgroups, but provide an overview of my grouping here.
- Function: Fortunately, LinkedIn only provides 12 different categories for Functional Roles. However, LinkedIn only shows the top 10 industries, so this is what I have shown in the data visualization.
- Size of Company: This was the simplest to obtain, as LinkedIn only provides 9 categories for Company Size, and provides this data consistently for all service branches. As a result, the data here will be the most accurate to actual LinkedIn data.
In order to display the data, I used the New York Time's D3 model. Special thanks to Nemil Dalal, who put together the majority of this data, and helped me as I put together the small remainder he did not complete. I also used Upwork in a few locations to help me edit this models and add them to my Wordpress website template.
All feedback and suggestions are welcome here.