Here's how we ranked the best US cities to change your job

To make our ranking of the best cities in the US to change your job, we looked at four major labor market indicators and a measure of job diversity for 362 major US metropolitan areas. Here are our sources and methods:

• June 2015 metro area unemployment rate: The unemployment rate, as well as the other three labor market indicators, came from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' State and Metro Area Current Employment Statistics program.
• June 2015 metro area average weekly wage: Average wages also came from the BLS' Current Employment Statistics tables.
• Year over year change in average weekly wage, June 2014-June 2015: The year over year change was calculated from the above wage data.
• Year over year change in non-farm payroll employees, June 2014-June 2015: A measure of job growth, this also came from the Current Employment Statistics program.
• Job diversity index: Using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics' May 2014 Occupational Employment Statistics program, we calculated a common measure of diversity called the Shannon Entropy for each metro area for the listed occupational groups with employment large enough to be reported by the BLS. Shannon Entropy is a good measure of diversity: A metro area in which every employed person had the same job would have an entropy of zero, and entropy increases as both the number of distinct job categories increases and as the distribution of workers among jobs becomes more even.

We rescaled our five metrics to make them comparable to each other by calculating z-scores, then added the normalized scores together with the four labor market indicators receiving an equal weight, and the job diversity index getting a double weight to reflect its importance to job seekers looking for a new career.

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