O*NET Field Overview

What are O*NET Fields?

The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is a comprehensive taxonomy created by the US Dept of Labor used to standardize job titles into a structured hierarchy. These fields allow you to group and analyze professionals based on their functional roles rather than just their raw (and often messy) job titles.

The current version maintained by the US Dept of Labor is the O*NET-SOC 2019 Taxonomy, which is the one we represent in our O*NET related fields.

Taxonomy Structure

The O*NET system assigns each job title a classification with 4 hierarchical categories:

1. Major Group: The broadest category. Groups occupations into 23 very large clusters, such as "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" or "Sales and Related Occupations." Best for high-level labor market analysis.
2. Minor Group: The second level of the hierarchy. Provides more specific categorization within a Major Group. For example, within "Computer Occupations," this would distinguish between "Database and Network Architects" and "Software Developers."
3. Broad Occupation: The third level of the hierarchy. This groups several specific occupations that require similar skills and duties. It’s the "middle ground" for grouping people with comparable professional backgrounds.
4. Specific Occupation: The standard functional role. This is the most commonly used level of the O*NET taxonomy. It maps a person’s job to a standardized title (e.g., "Software Quality Assurance Analysts and Testers") to ensure consistent reporting across different companies

There is also an optional 5th level of classification to provide detail beyond the Specific Occupation Level:

5. Specific Occupation Detail: An optional additional level of classification below Specific Occupation. This used to further distinguish roles that fall within a Specific Occupational category (e.g., Chief Technology Officer as the Detailed classification within the Chief Executives Specific Occupation classification).

The O*NET Code

Each job title is assigned a 6-digit O*NET code which represents its classification in the above taxonomy. For example the code 29-1062.00 is assigned to job titles related to Family and General Practitioner Healthcare roles.

O*NET codes are structured as follows:

For the given example of Family and General Practitioner Healthcare roles (29-1062), this breaks down as follows:

PDL O*NET Fields

Within the PDL Person Schema, you will find 6 O*NET-related fields:

• job_onet_code
• job_onet_major_group
• job_onet_minor_group
• job_onet_broad_occupation
• job_onet_specific_occupation
• job_onet_specific_occupation_detail

These fields represent map to O*NET concepts in a straightforward way: