Map: Each state’s most distinctive job

Texas is full of oilmen, and Kentucky and West Virginia are big on mining. That’s pretty obvious, but some states have disproportionate employment in less intuitive categories. New Hampshire is all about forest fire prevention, Missouri likes to split rocks, and Mississippi is for upholsterers.

Here’s a state-by-state look at the most disproportionately popular job in each place (scroll over to zoom or click here for a bigger map):

On a technical level, what this map looks at are location quotients. These are calculated by the Labor Department’s Occupational Employment Statistics operation every few years. The most recent one was completed in May of 2013. The way it works is you look at what share of people in Massachusetts are Industrial Organization Psychologists. Then you look at what share of people in America are Industrial Organizational Psychologists. The ratio between the two is the location quotient for Industrial Organization Psychologists in Massachusetts — 8.18, as it happens.

In other words, even though relatively few people in the Bay State are IO Psychologists, that job is over eight times more common there than in the nation as a whole.

(Fans of internet maps may note that Andy Kiersz at Business Insider did a similar map in April, but Kiersz and I seem to have come up with different jobs for quite a few states — I’m not entirely sure why that is)