This guide is designed for local and state authorities who seek a better understanding of the performance of their vocational education programs. Its basic theme is management diagnostics. The first section provides a brief introduction to three decades of research that has been conducted on wage records submitted by employers under unemployment compensation laws. The second section uses an optics metaphor to demonstrate the interplay of candidate qualifications, employer requirements, and employment opportunity as these ultimately determine whether and how a former student prospers in the workplace--employment and earnings history. This section shows that a single vocational education event cannot be easily isolated as the force that resulted in a particular employment outcome. The third section uses multiple concepts and measures of employment and earnings. The relevance of preenrollment, concurrent, and postenrollment measures of each is emphasized. This section offers many examples of the weakness of single point-in-time measures of employment status and documents why attribution of observed markers of employment as placements cannot be sustained in many cases. The fourth section explores the following: (1) alignment of enrollment and employment affiliations, (2) documentation of continuing education, (3) multiple employer affiliations, (4) censoring reported earnings, and (5) specification and estimation of models. Contains 47 references. (YLB)