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| What are occupational classifications used for?
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National occupational classifications and dictionaries are usually designed to serve several purposes. Although the detailed occupational descriptions and the classification structure must be seen as two parts of an integrated whole, different user areas have different degrees of interest in the various elements:
- Detailed occupational descriptions are used by those who need to know about the tasks, duties and working conditions of jobs. They are mostly client oriented users (for example those responsible for job placement, vocational training and guidance, migration control, etc.). The occupational descriptions should be designed primarily to meet the needs of such users, but must also include the descriptive elements necessary for applying relevant aggregation schemes.
- The classification structure, i.e. the grouping of the detailed occupations together in progressively more aggregate groups, should be designed mainly to facilitate the sorting of jobs and persons into groups, i.e. for the matching of job seekers and vacancies, or for statistical description and analysis of the labour market and the social and economic structure of society.
Depending on the purpose of the study, the variable occupation may be regarded as the main variable in the empirical analysis, or it may serve as a background variable. Used as a background variable, it may serve as a proxy for other variables such as socio economic groups or working conditions, or it may be used as one element in the construction of other variables, such as social class or socio economic status. The resolution needed for the value set to satisfy these different areas of use, i.e. the degree of detail in the classification, will differ greatly, for example, from the distinction between just two groups (manual v. non-manual or white-collar v. blue-collar) to the more than 10,000 occupations described in the U.S. Dictionary of Occupational Titles.
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