Improving the data: Challenges and opportunities
Data should be timely, detailed and reflect each sector's unique labour market.
But there's a trade-off between quality and timeliness, and it’s hard to find data sources that reflect sectors' unique characteristics.
Updating data to the tax year ending March 2023
In 2025, we’ll update workforce data up to the tax year ending March 2023.
There's a delay in our receiving workforce numbers because in some circumstances, self-employed people and business owners can file income tax returns up to 12 months after the tax year ends (during the covid pandemic this was extended further). Stats NZ must then process and anonymise the data, which also takes time.
How we’ll enrich the data in 2024
Today, data on this site focusses on workforce counts covering:
- average annual counts
- monthly counts to show seasonal impacts
- employee and self-employed
- visa and resident status
- regional breakdowns.
In the next release, we’ll enrich this data with workforce demographics such as gender, age and ethnicity.
MPI will work closely with the ‘Data and forecasting working group’ to decide how to analyse this data because demographics will vary for subgroups of the workforce, such as by sector, self-employed or an employee and whether someone is employed permanently or part-year.
What else we’re interested in
We could enhance knowledge about subsets of the food and fibre workforce in many ways. MPI will keep working with the working group to identify other helpful data, such as income and experience level.