Hoosiers by the NumbersPublic Licensing Agency Data
One in seven people working in Indiana have a professional or occupational license, according to the Indiana Professional Licensing Agency (PLA). That agency serves as an umbrella organization for more than 35 boards, commissions, committees and licensing bodies, such as the Medical Licensing Board and the Indiana Real Estate Commission. It regulates more than 70 professional licenses including physicians, pharmacists, nurses, accountants, engineers, and more.
The combined database the PLA has built includes information on licenses, certificates or permits. It contains nearly 2 million records, some of which go as far back as 1905 (the majority of licenses prior to 1925 were for registered nurses). Our focus was on the current licenses of individuals for the professions covered. It should be noted that it does not include teacher licensing, which is collected by the Indiana Department of Education.
The Indiana Business Research Center (IBRC) incorporated public licensing data from Indiana into the Workforce Data Quality Initiative (WDQI) Occupation Assignment project. The Indiana Department of Workforce Development made the de-identified data from 2005 to the present available with a randomly generated universal ID field that allowed these data to be matched to their wage records, unemployment insurance claims, and public higher education records from the Indiana Research and Analysis Warehouse data system.
IBRC incorporated these data to develop the approach that allowed the active license(s) of an individual to serve as a proxy for their occupation. To acknowledge that a license holder may be employed in an occupation not related to their license or certification, we developed procedures to check salary and industry of employment against the occupation(s) associated with each active license.
The documents listed below provided the methods used and guides to utilizing these methods for other State Labor Market Information shops who would like to test this within their own agency with their workforce and licensing data. We also provide the critical crosswalks that are necessary and our Stata programs specific to running this module of our Occupation Assignment Engine.
Documentation
- Assigning standard occupation codes using Public Licensing Agency data
- Licensing occupation assignment instructions
License-SOC crosswalk
Code Files
Note: These files are both specific to running the module in Stata
- Licensing_SOC_Assignment.txt
- Licensing_SOC_Assignment.do (right-click to save file)