Worker Research and Employer Segmentation for a Gates Foundation Program
Combining national survey design and statistical clustering to develop seven employer personas for job-quality research and program planning.
Context
Within a policy advisory firm’s multi-year Gates Foundation research program, we led the design and analysis of a national worker survey to understand job quality in small and mid-sized employers. The objective was to turn a broad economic-mobility challenge into practical employer segments that could guide strategy, resource allocation, and partner engagement.
Approach
We developed a 70-item instrument covering pay and benefits, scheduling and stability, respect and autonomy, and career mobility. The survey was fielded through a national panel with targeted demographic oversamples. We designed quotas across firm size, industry, demographic groups, and geography, and built quality controls, a weighting methodology, a survey codebook, and derived analytical measures.
In R, we compared k-means, hierarchical Ward, and latent-class approaches across six- through ten-cluster configurations. Statistical checks and domain-expert validation supported a seven-persona segmentation. Each persona was characterized using composite measures of job-quality gaps, employer readiness, policy leverage, and community priority.
Results
We delivered seven employer personas, each characterized on four composite dimensions, alongside the documented clustering pipeline, variable definitions, stakeholder visualizations, and Tableau exploration. These assets supported the Foundation’s strategic planning and subsequent research phases beyond the original analysis.
