The evidence standard
Every figure published under this name carries a grade, and the grade is the first thing to read. It answers one question: who measured this, and what did they have to gain by the answer?
| Grade | What it is | What that looks like |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | A body with the power to compel an answer, and nothing to sell you | A statistics office, a tax authority, a regulator |
| 2 | A large survey that publishes its method and states its sample | An industry workforce survey |
| 3 | A record of money that actually moved, checked by somebody with a reason to check it | A filed wage, verified payroll |
| 4 | An aggregator republishing what people typed in | A salary comparison site |
| 5 | Somebody describing the thing they sell | A training provider’s own outcome figures |
What a grade lets you do with a number
A grade is not a score out of five. It is a statement about what the number can be used for, and the rule differs at each step.
Grades 1 to 3 carry an amount. Somebody with the standing to know measured it, and you can act on the figure itself.
Grade 4 carries a direction and never an amount. If it says senior pays more than junior, believe that. Do not believe the digits after the first one.
Grade 5 is quoted only as an example of a claim to distrust. It is advertising. It appears here when the advertising is the subject.
The grade travels with the figure, next to it, rather than sitting in a note on methodology at the back. That is the whole of the discipline: a reader should never have to go looking for how much weight a number will take.
The second question, which the grade does not answer
A source can be perfect on provenance and useless to you anyway.
A government publishes exactly what one small programme pays in one expensive city. That is grade 1, audited, impossible to argue with, and a bad answer to “what does this kind of work pay?” Meanwhile a weaker source that actually surveyed the people you are asking about may tell you more.
So there are two questions, in this order. Who measured it, and what do they sell? That is the grade. Did they measure the people I am asking about? That is the fit. A figure has to pass both, and a figure that passes the first and fails the second is marked here rather than quietly used.
What happens when nothing meets the standard
Three things, and none of them is an estimate.
The entry is left empty. Where no figure reaches the required grade, nothing is printed. A number with nothing behind it is a rumour with the decimal point still attached.
A well-sourced figure about the wrong population is marked. It is printed, because the surrounding market is worth seeing, and it carries the reason it does not count beside it rather than in an endnote.
The question is written down and published. Everything that could not be answered at the required grade goes into a register that ships with the work, free, before anybody has paid for anything.
It applies to the work published here
The standard is not a claim about other people’s evidence. It is applied to this imprint’s own, and it is applied in public where the result is unflattering.
Of the 46 careers examined in the research published so far, 17 have a pay figure meeting the standard and 11 have one for how long entry takes. Five clear both. That count is published with its working, recomputed from the shipped data on every build, and the build refuses to publish a figure it cannot recompute.
There are 138 questions in the gap register. 22 of those gaps are marked closeable, meaning a published source exists and nobody here has compiled it yet.
Where it is set out at length
The long form runs to a chapter, with worked examples of each grade failing in public, and it is free to read with nothing to sign. It sits inside the first book published here because that is where it was first written down, not because the standard belongs to it.