Hiring at Western Electric

We have collected data from Western Electric on some of their production workers.   In this assignment you must determine the educational requirements that you would recommend for their hiring.  The data include productivity in units/hour, education level, gender, their tenure with the firm, whether they quit in their first 6 months with Western Electric, how they were hired, and their score on a dexterity exam that was given prior to their employment.

For this assignment, you should ignore the costs of turnover.  You simply need to focus on the relationship between the net value of employees and their education level.

You can assume that Western Electric will pay average wages for workers of each educational level.  This plant of Western Electric is located in a large metropolitan area.  You can determine average wages by education from the CPS data that are available in EXCEL format.  In this data set, wages are hourly wages, SMASTAT=1 for metropolitan area; 2=rural;3=mid-size cities and EDUC is education in years.

The Western Electric data are available on an EXCEL spreadsheet .  You should print out the variable information that is located in the SPSS file information file to know the meanings of the variables.  For this assignment, assume that output/hour is the same across types of location.

First, compute average wages by education level for workers in each type of metropolitan area. (You can do this by using a pivot table command.   (Note that sample sizes under 20 are probably not valuable to determine these averages.)  This will serve as the "cost" of hiring workers at this level.   This requires using the CPS data.  Next, you will need to find the value of workers at each education level.  To do this, we need to know their productivity.  You can compute this productivity from the Western Electric data.  Finally, you need to compute the relative cost of workers by education level by using both sets of data.  

To support your result, you should present a histogram that shows why you have chosen the education level.  You can do this by importing the wage and productivity results into EXCEL.

You can use the PAGE field to do tables that contain rows and columns and separate groups in a Pivot Table.  If you want the same information for each group (say by SMASTAT), you can drag SMASTAT to the PAGE button.  Your output will start will (ALL) in the table.  That is, it will contain all information from all values of SMASTAT.  If you want only the metropolitan area, then you click on (ALL) and go down the list and select "1".  Then your table will produce all the values for SMASTAT=1.  You can copy this table to another location to save it.

This project is to introduce you to how to evaluate hiring criteria using both cost data and productivity data.