Certificates

Certificates are a means to increased professional growth and a higher income. They might be a standalone qualification or a complement to a college degree. Examples include a real estate license, a medical assistant certification, a Teacher License or an IT certification. Certificates allow workers to obtain job-specific skills and often open the door for high school graduates to obtain a two or four-year degree later in life. Industry leaders identify certificate earners as life-long learners with ambition and workplace efficiency, opening the door to promotions and raises. Collection of certificate data only began in 2015, so further breakdowns of this metric are currently unavailable.

Peer City Perspective

Louisville currently ranks 9th among its peer cities in rates of certificate attainment, with 21.3% of working-age adults holding a certificate. Around one-quarter of certificate holders do not have a college degree, meaning their certificate is their highest credential.

Louisville is in the middle cluster of its peer group according to a natural breaks algorithm. Cities in green are those that outperform their peers, cities in yellow represent the middle cluster, and those in red lag behind their peers on this indicator.

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Natural Breaks Algorithm

For each indicator, Greater Louisville Project assigns cities into one of three groups (high-performing, middle-of-the-pack, and low-performing) based on how they compare to other cities. The assignment is based on how cities naturally cluster on that indicator. Sometimes, the differences between cities are very small, and the difference between a city ranked 5th and 6th could simply be a matter of the sampling error that arises from using survey data. Thus, rather than always make a division that declares the top 5 to be the top tier, we use a natural breaks algorithm to look for a cluster of cities that is outperforming the rest, a cluster that is about average, and a cluster that is lagging. This clustering gives us a better indication of where Louisville is thriving and where Louisville has room to learn from cities that are doing better.

Z-Scores

Z-scores (or standardization) is a way to combine data with different units of measurement into a single index. The z-score is a measure of how far away a city (or census tract, etc.) is from the average city. In order to be comparable across different units of measurement, the z-score is the distance from the mean measured in standard deviations (e.g. if Louisville has a z-score of 1 it means Louisville is 1 standard deviation above the mean of its peer cities).

Data from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation's County Health Rankings use z-scores and all z-scores are relative to the mean of Louisville's peer cities. (On the County Health Rankings site z-scores are relative to all the counties in each state - thus z-scores reported by GLP will be different, because we are using a different reference group). The Greater Louisville Project also uses z-scores in our multidimensional poverty index, which compares each census tract to the mean of all census tracts in Louisville.