In the case of education to workforce, there are many complex processes that generate data, and it can easily turn into a giant plate of spaghetti. This is particularly true in education data, where there are many different institutions providing many different certifications, and individuals move in and out of programs and across institutions over time.

For the purposes of this work, a very simplified data schema of the process is provided in Figure 1. The details on each is described in the data dictionaries. Each table represents a different activity. For the purposes of this analysis, the focus is on individuals (highlighted in blue). There are repeated observations on individuals (highlighted in pink). Information on the key organizations have already been collapsed - because this is not a course in database management – educational institutions are highlighted in green and employers are highlighted in yellow. Each one of these data elements have been generated from other tables in a very large scale system at KYSTATS. Illustrative examples of how the data elements have been constructed, and the decisions that were made to create the mapping, are provided in the appendix.

Figure 5: Kentucky data schema