Good morning. I'm Ken Brown. Welcome. Thanks for coming to this second of our series of meetings with SRS and the data and survey people of the professional
associations. [ Proceedings of the first SRS/Professional Society Workshop ]
The reason why we get together in a forum like this is
because we all have the common goal of finding out more about the market for scientists and engineers. We realize that we
each have a somewhat different approach to the problem and our data systems are, therefore, different. These meetings
represent an opportunity to share our different approaches and findings.
In SRS, we use our data to get an understanding of what
has happened and why it has happened with respect to unemployment, job mobility, and professional membership.
Indeed, those are the three presentations you are going to hear from SRS staff. In other words, our approach is to take
surveys, go into considerable depth in the data in analyzing it. One of the major strengths of our work is that we cover
the entire range of scientific and engineering personnel jobs.
In the second part of our meeting, we will move into the
presentations by selected professional association representatives. In looking at the program, I see such words
as "new developments," "opportunities," "changing outlook". These presentations will
undoubtedly include data that is more up to date than the SRS data. This is certainly a major strength of the work you do
in the professional societies. You are more on the cutting edge and more up to date than we are in terms of what is
going on and in describing the outlook for the job market.
In the third part of the meeting we will discuss
improvements in the data system -- how can we do all of these things that we're trying to do and do them better. We have a
small working group that will be reporting on the work they are doing on some of these problems.
Our first SRS presenter is Carolyn Shettle who, as most
of you know, is our chief statistician at SRS.
