Workforce Data Products: Wages, Nursing and AI Exposure
An electrical contractor needs to know what a journeyman earns in their metro before the offer goes out. A director of nursing needs to show the CFO which units are losing staff. An HR strategy lead has been asked by the board which roles AI will change. All three questions can be answered with public U.S. government data, and all three people usually end up answering them by hand in a spreadsheet.
Three of our products are built for those jobs: SkilledMarkets, NursingWorkforce and WorkforceAnalysis. This article covers what each one does, the public data underneath it, who it is for, and what you can buy today. The same rule applies to all three. The digital stores are live and sell templates and workbooks now. The software apps are on a waitlist and not yet open for sign-up.
The two public datasets behind all three
All three products draw on the same two federal sources, so they are worth understanding first.
BLS OEWS. The Bureau of Labor Statistics' Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics program produces employment and wage estimates annually for approximately 830 occupations, for the nation, each state, and metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas. Beyond the mean, it publishes wages at the 10th, 25th, 50th (median), 75th and 90th percentiles. A percentile wage is "the value of a wage below which a certain percentage of workers fall."
OEWS has limits that matter if you set pay with it. It does not include the self-employed or owners and partners in unincorporated firms, and each release pools survey panels collected over three years. BLS also does not encourage using OEWS for time-series analysis, so comparing one year's figure with the last is not a reliable trend line.
OEWS also doesn't break wages out by experience. BLS's own guidance is that someone new to a field may expect wages near the 10th or 25th percentile, and someone with more experience and education near the 75th or 90th, and that location is "a very important factor" in where a worker falls. So when a tool maps "entry", "journey" and "senior" to percentiles, that mapping is a choice the employer makes. It is not a number BLS publishes.
O*NET. The O*NET Program is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Labor's Employment and Training Administration and describes itself as "the nation's primary source of occupational information." It covers more than 900 occupation profiles. Each profile lists knowledge, skills, abilities, work activities and tasks, drawn from more than 19,000 task statements. Tasks carry importance ratings on a 1 ("Not Important") to 5 ("Extremely Important") scale. Occupations are grouped into five Job Zones by how much education, related experience and on-the-job training the work requires.
Both datasets are free. The work is in getting from a raw download to an answer about your own roles, in your own locations, that you can defend to someone else. That conversion is what these three products are for.
SkilledMarkets: wage benchmarks for skilled-trades hiring
SkilledMarkets is described as "BLS wage data for skilled-trades hiring." It is for HR managers, recruiters and owner-operators at trade contractors with roughly 10–200 employees. The listed trades include electrical, plumbing, HVAC, welding, carpentry and masonry, along with industrial maintenance, machinery manufacturers and any employer hiring trades across more than one state or metro.
The planned app combines OEWS wages with O*NET profiles. Planned features include:
Occupation search across 10 trade categories, by keyword or SOC code
OEWS wage percentiles (10/25/50/75/90) at national, state and metro level
O*NET enrichment for every occupation: skills, tasks, knowledge and Job Zone
A salary-band generator that sets a minimum, midpoint and maximum around a percentile you choose, plus a multi-level builder for entry, journey and senior bands
Branded PDF and CSV export with O*NET attribution, and saved searches for recurring occupation and location combinations
The percentile caveat above applies here. The band builder anchors to the percentile you choose. The data doesn't decide what "journey level" means at your company. You do.
What the store sells today: the SkilledMarkets store has workbooks and reports you can use now, including a Skilled Trades Salary Band Builder, a Metro Wage Comparison Workbook, a State-by-State Trade Wage Atlas, an Apprentice-to-Journeyman Wage Progression Planner, a Foreman & Field-Supervisor Wage Benchmark Workbook and a Loaded Labor Rate & Burden Calculator. There are trade-specific wage and hiring kits for electrical, HVAC and mechanical, plumbing, and industrial-maintenance contractors. An OEWS Percentile & Suppression Reader Guide explains how to read the source data itself. A starter bundle and a complete kit round it out.
NursingWorkforce: turnover and vacancy analytics for nurse leaders
NursingWorkforce is described as "nursing turnover analytics at SMB price points." It is for CNOs, directors of nursing and nurse managers responsible for roughly 50–500 nursing FTEs, healthcare HR directors running two to five facilities, skilled-nursing and continuing-care communities, and home-health agencies.
The scale of the workforce is part of why this matters. BLS's Occupational Outlook Handbook counts 3,465,400 registered nurse jobs in 2025 and projects about 180,800 openings a year, on average, over the decade. Every one of those openings is a vacancy someone has to plan around.
The planned app is a dashboard. Planned features include:
RN/LPN headcount and vacancy tracking by unit, comparing budgeted and actual FTEs
A rolling 12-month turnover dashboard benchmarked against the national average
An annualized turnover-cost calculator with a cost-per-departure figure you configure
BLS wage benchmarking for RN and LPN/LVN by state and metro, with O*NET enrichment for healthcare roles
Formula-based retention-risk scoring per unit and six-month vacancy forecasting
A retention action log and a monthly PDF summary report
The configurable cost-per-departure is the useful design choice. A facility's real replacement cost depends on its own agency rates, orientation time and overtime. A tool that lets you enter your own figure produces a number your finance team can check.
What the store sells today: the NursingWorkforce store includes an RN Turnover Tracker, a Nursing Vacancy & FTE Forecasting Workbook, a Travel Nurse Cost vs. Staff Retention ROI Calculator, an Overtime & Understaffing Premium Cost Model, a Nurse Exit Interview Analysis & Reason-Coding Workbook and a Nurse Retention Risk Scorecard by Unit. For budgeting and reporting there is an Annual Nursing Workforce Budget Planning Workbook, a Multi-Facility Nurse Turnover & Vacancy Rollup Dashboard and a CFO-Ready Nursing Workforce Summary Report Template. There are also state staffing packs, for California's §70217 unit ratios, Oregon's HB 2697 and the committee-and-disclosure states (NY, IL, NJ, RI, VT), plus a complete kit. Staffing law varies by state and changes over time, and none of this is legal advice. Confirm current requirements with your state's regulator or your own counsel.
WorkforceAnalysis: a company-specific answer on AI exposure
WorkforceAnalysis answers a different question. Its tagline is "Answer the board's AI workforce risk question in hours." The planned app, called AI Exposure Analyzer, is for HR strategy directors, VPs of People and CHROs at organizations with roughly 200–5,000 employees. It is also for people-analytics teams and the boutique HR consultancies that run these assessments for clients.
The gap it targets is the one between research and a decision. Published research on AI exposure looks at occupations across the whole economy (we looked at state-level data in AI and the U.S. Workforce: Data From Five Key States). That research can't tell a company which of its own 40 role types are exposed, or what to do about them.
The planned workflow:
Upload a headcount CSV and confirm the O*NET occupation match for each role. Fuzzy title-to-SOC matching shows a confidence score, and you can override any match.
Each task is scored on a four-dimension rubric (cognitive routine, physical routine, social/judgment and creative) and weighted by O*NET task importance.
A department heatmap groups roles into Low, Moderate, High and Critical bands, with drill-down to individual roles.
For each High or Critical role, the app suggests three to five adjacent occupations, with skill-overlap percentages and an estimate of the reskilling effort.
The assessment exports as a board-ready PDF summary or PPTX deck, and scenario snapshots let you compare one quarter with the next.
Transparency is the design principle. Every score traces back to O*NET task inputs that anyone can look up, so a board member who asks "why is this role High?" can get a concrete answer. An exposure score is still a structured estimate, not a forecast of what will happen to a job. It is a starting point for planning.
What the store sells today: the WorkforceAnalysis store includes an AI Exposure Scorecard, a Department Exposure Heatmap Builder, a Role Redeployment Planning Workbook, a Skills-Gap Analysis Worksheet, an O*NET Task-Mapping Methodology Handbook and a Board Deck & Executive-Summary Template Pack. There are governance and change-management packs, a Redeployment ROI & Cost-of-Inaction Calculator and industry packs for financial services, healthcare administration, professional services and manufacturing. Consultants can buy an HR Consultant Client-Delivery Kit.
Why these three sit in our portfolio
Each of these markets has a well-defined buyer and authoritative free data, yet the workflow is still spreadsheet-heavy. Large HR and workforce platforms serve the enterprise end. A 40-person HVAC contractor or a 120-bed skilled-nursing facility is often too small to justify them. That is the kind of gap we described in The Opportunity in "Too Small".
The stores are live now. A workbook is something a nurse manager or a contractor's office manager can use this week. The apps are on a waitlist. We don't claim users or customers for them, and the waitlist on each product's site is the honest way in.
Where to start
Setting pay for trades roles: start with the SkilledMarkets product page and its salary-band and metro-comparison workbooks.
Tracking nursing turnover and vacancies: start with NursingWorkforce and its turnover tracker and vacancy forecasting workbook.
Answering the board on AI: start with the WorkforceAnalysis exposure scorecard and methodology handbook.
Every Rovaryn product is on the products page. If you are naming a product in this space, our HR and workforce domains are listed at fixed prices, such as WorkActivity.com at $5,873.