About a week and a half ago the Internet erupted with the latest viral hashtag: #firstsevenjobs. The idea was to tweet/blog/Facebook your first seven jobs.
Musical by Design
Marian Call, a Juneau-based musician, initially posted this question to her Twitter followers as part of research for a new song. Last week, on my way home from the office, I happened to be listening to a NPR Marketplace interview with Call, who was talking about how the project came to be.
Later in the interview, the question of what do to with all the data came up. Marian said something to the tune of: "I'm not sure how I will analyze it all," and a light bulb went off in my head! Surely this could be a case for Watson, IBM's Cognitive Technology.
We've Come a Long Way Since Jeopardy
All IBMers have access to Watson Analytics and Watson Analytics for Social Media -- I popped the social media search into the tool and started visualizing the data. There were just a little over 24k tweets. I have to say, tweets are messy. Emoticons, @ symbols, retweets, etc. -- there is a lot of noise in that data!
Once I was able to filter out some of that distortion, I was able to see some of the most reoccurring jobs that were listed. Watson Analytics then helped provide some of the other data including location, gender, etc.
Have a look for yourself below in the infographic. I think that the information is in line with expectations of what American teens tend to describe as some of their first jobs... paperboy, babysitter, cashier, barista. Marian and I are working on delivering a more detailed analysis, so stay tuned!
What do you think? Did Watson accurately make a snapshot of the responses you saw? What were your first seven jobs?
Infographic by Colleen Stone