The Best Cities for Jobs, Visually

I was pleased to recognize my hometown skyline in a recent Forbes.com article exploring the best cities for jobs. But skylines were the only visuals that supplemented the article, so naturally I used Tableau to study the rankings geographically.

Joel Kotkin authors the New Geographer column, and thoughtfully shared the raw data. The cities are ranked within three groups: Best Big Cities, Best Mid-Sized Cities and Best Small Cities. Here's the overall rank of job growth on a map, which clearly identifies the region Joel describes as "zone of sanity" – cities that did not participate in the housing boom and subsequent bust.

It's also interesting to look at the most and least improved cities when compared to the prior year's rankings:

I used a scatterplot of total employment vs. movement in job growth rank to visualize interesting outliers:

Of the larger cities, Boston, the DC area, and New York show improvement in job growth rank. That corresponds to what we saw on the maps above; the Northeast and Midwest are improving their rank more than other areas.