Good wage surveys take time to conduct. The sample must be designed and selected, data collected, coding and editing completed, analysis conducted, and results published. The 2005 OES survey took about 9 months to complete. Wage information was collected for the last quarter of 2005. Follow-up contacts with non-respondents to collect data continued through June of 2006.
If the users of wage information understand when the data was collected, they can make assumptions about its reliability.
Historically, wages in general do not change quickly. However, for occupations and industries that are growing faster than average, the wages of workers in these occupations and industries may change rapidly. For some high-demand occupations, especially in the information technology and skilled health care fields, wages have increased more rapidly than other occupations.
