Job Task Analysis Data
Happy early AOM Day! To celebrate, we’re releasing all the data analysis we have of the JTA so far. If you want more, you’re going to have to help us crunch it. (Seriously, we are looking for willing volunteers to plunge into the depths of POCA’s data mine.)
But before we do that, let’s indulge in a quick statistics review! Let’s talk about mean, median and mode.
They’re the three most common kinds of averages. The “mean” is the “average” we generally think of, where you add up all the numbers and then divide by the number of numbers. The “median” is the “middle” value in the list of numbers. To find the median, your numbers have to be listed in numerical order from smallest to largest. The “mode” is the value that occurs most often.
I thought it might be fun to look at the acupuncture profession from the perspective of the mode, the values that occurred the most often, and the questions that were answered with the most consistency. Let’s look in the mirror, acupuncture profession! From a statistics perspective, and according to POCA’s JTA, who are you?
Regardless of your practice style, you are:
white and female
between 35 and 54 years old
if you’re reading the JTA analyses, you might be gnashing your teeth because you can see that it’s possible to make 6 figures practicing community acupuncture, and 7 figures practicing in a private setting — but you are not making that
you’re making $40,000 a year practicing acupuncture
what you earn from practicing acupuncture is 100% of your household income
your work life is not particularly consistent with what you expected while you were in acupuncture school
you have outstanding student loans of $100K, but you have monthly payments of $0, because you are on Income Based Repayment
this means your student loan balance is not going down, it’s going up, year after year
you really wish your acupuncture school had taught you better practice management and given you some business skills
and you almost never talk to MDs.
Naturally, none of this is a huge surprise to POCA.
We got more responses from people whose only source of income is acupuncture than we expected to get, which makes sense considering how we distributed our survey: we leaned heavily on POCA membership and on distribution through social media, particularly people who belong to online acupuncture groups and also state associations. The ASA was a very big help. And so the people who are no longer practicing acupuncture didn’t answer our survey at any greater rate than they answer the NCCAOM’s. We know they’re out there; we asked for their information; it’s not all that surprising that they didn’t respond. CEUs aren’t much of a carrot when you’re no longer in the field.
OK, enough commentary for now! Please enjoy the data.
Go to: https://www.pocatech.org/poca-tech-job-task-analysis-2017
look towards the right of the page and click on the link labeled “Outline”
and rummage around to your heart's content. What's that, your heart is not content? Leave us a comment here on the blog, and if you want to help get more JTA data into usable form, we would love that, just let us know.
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