Our Questions

1. Is there a correlation between work experience and salary?

2. Is there a correlation between data visualization experience and salary?

Audience & Assumptions

Our audience is people interested in pursuing data visualization as a career, or those already in the data visualization field.

We assume that the data used is accurate and the responses by participants are honest.

Methodology

The team first acquired data from the 2021 Main Dataset given to us on Brightspace by Dr. Byrd. Then, we got familiar with the data and came up with our topic. We realized the data looked at work experience and data visualization experience and we thought this was interesting and wanted to know how each type could affect salary differently.

The team then used Excel to filter our data and sort out people who did not live in the United States.

We made visualizations for both work experience and data visualization experience to compare salaries but broke it down by different ranges of years of experience. You can see these visualizations below.

The last visualization required some mining of the data to do some calculations with averages.

For question 1.
This visualization highlights the differences in salary for people in data visualization positions with 0-5 years of ANY work experience. Noticeably, people with 5 years of experience cluster around the $60k-$99k range, but this range and the $40k-$59k range are also the most common. As the salary gets over $120k, there are no people with 1 or fewer years of experience.

For question 1.
This visualization highlights the differences in salary for people in data visualization positions with 6-20 years of ANY work experience. The most noticeably populated ranges here are $60k-$139k, much larger than the most populated ranges of the 1-5 years of experience graph. This supports the idea that the average salary increases when years of experience exceed 5 years. Also, notice how there are fewer people with 16-20 years of experience and more with 6-10 years of experience.

For question 1.
This visualization highlights the differences in salary for people in data visualization positions with 21-30+ years of ANY work experience. There is a striking number of people within the $100k-$119k range, with the majority of them having 21-25 years of experience. This is interesting because there were more people with less experience on the previous graph within the higher range, $120k-$139k. This possibly points to little correlation between work experience and salary when years of experience exceed 6 years. Alternatively, these results could point to unequal amounts of demographics (years of experience) within the dataset, for example, there were fewer people with greater years of experience, so the numbers could be misleading.

For question 2.
This visualization highlights the differences in salary for people in data visualization positions with 0-5 years of data visualization experience. The most populated ranges of the graph are between $60k-$99k. These ranges noticeably do not have a lot of people with <1 year of experience, and it appears that with 2 years of experience these salaries become more normal.

For question 2.
This visualization highlights the differences in salary for people in data visualization positions with 6-20 years of data visualization experience. The most populated ranges are more spread out here, spanning $60k-$159k, with a very noticeable amount of people with 6-10 years of experience. This great amount of people with 6-10 years of experience was seen previously in the 6-20 year graph for any work experience, making us believe there were a lot of people surveyed with 6-10 years of experience, and that possibly there are more people in this range in the workforce.

For question 2.
This visualization highlights the differences in salary for people in data visualization positions with 21-30+ years of data visualization experience. This graph is more varied than the other graphs. There are very few people that fall into the years of experience ranges, and those that do are more equally distributed, slightly favoring the lower end/left side. It is shown that the few people with 30+ years fall into the higher ranges of $140k, $180k, and $240k+. Although it should be realized with such a small number of people in this experience range the results do not provide definitive conclusions, however, it is logical that they fall in the upper end of the salary ranges.

This visualization compares the previously discussed values in a more tangible way. One can see that, on average, people with more data visualization experience tend to make more money than those who have a higher amount of work experience. Through the R-squared values, one can also observe that there is a greater correlation between salary growth and data visualization experience than there is between salary growth and work experience.

Conclusions

1. Data visualization experience is more valuable when looking at salary than overall work experience.

2. Both higher amounts of work experience and data visualization experience correlate with a higher salary.