I enjoyed this graphic showing the association between a person’s profession and what they studied in school.  If you click on one of the boxes on the left or right you can focus on that. Reload to return to the first view.

Where do salesmen come from?

The distributions are what I found interesting.  If you study “mass media” it is hard to predict what you’ll be doing down the road.  If you study electrical engineering it’s easier to predict.  You’d think that would be something schools ought to tell their students.  If you meet somebody who’s a lawyer, a manager, or in sales it’s hard to predict what they studied in school.  It makes me wonder if there is unmet demand for schools aligned to some of these professions.

The distributions inside of professions must say something about the dynamics for workers in the profession.  Obviously if 50% of your peers all studied the same things in school it must make it a bit tedious for the 50% who didn’t study that narrow speciality.  This kind of data lest you measure how “professionalized” a trade is.

Looking at these for a bit you start thinking that some of the categories are pretty arbitrary.  For example about a third of the salesmen in the sample above studied variations on “business.”  That just leads to wondering how much difference is there between these category names?