Occupational Information Network
Sign In
Overview
Federal
Proprietary
Articles
Department of Labor

Occupational Information Network (O*NET)

O*NET Overview

The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is a career exploration resource developed under the sponsorship of the U.S. Department of Labor and the Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA) through a grant to the North Carolina Department of Commerce. O*NET maintains several web resources aimed at making detailed career information available to the general public. Their data is unique in its cataloging of various aspects of careers, such as "What do you need to know?", "What kind of interests should you have?", or "Is it physically demanding?"

Methodology and content

O*NET provides many rated lists resulting from information surveyed through workers. Jobs are thus described down to minute details of the work done. At Ididio, we found those lists to be a bit overwhelming to interpret, so we reimagined the organization of the O*NET topics in order to make the lists more accessible to people searching for jobs that match their interests, priorities, and concerns.

O*NET measures activities, abilities, knowledge, and skills for both level and importance, though we use only the importance measure. Our changes to the data include:

  • Converting any measures/scales not already from 0 to 100 to the 0 to 100 scale using a linear transformation.

  • Omitting some areas that we felt provided less insight due to their long detail, such as tasks, or lack of distinction between careers, such as work values.

  • Consolidating multiple long lists of similar items. For example, we consolidate and summarize multiple references to specific physical hazards, mental stresses, and communication, management, and analytical skills.

The full original detail is easily accessed at O*NET online, and we believe the job descriptions we include from Occupational Outlook Handbook fill in the missing detail well.

Finding the data

This page includes information from the O*NET 25.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), accessed on August 18, 2020 and used under the CC BY 4.0 license. Ididio has modified all or some of this information as described above. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications. We remove any records that are marked as recommended for suppression or not applicable.

In particular, until November 2020, O*NET will remain to be based on the 2010 SOC codes. In cases for which the 2010 SOC occupation has split into two or more new more specific career designations, we have simply duplicated prior information for the new careers. In cases in which two 2010 occupations have merged for the a SOC career designation, we have combined the data for the O*NET careers associated with the prior designations.

The full O*NET resource is easily accessed at O*NET online. We downloaded the O*NET data for our site from the O*NET Resource Center.

Additional details for this source
Military Crosswalks

O*NET has gathered multiple resources to help military personal transition to civilian jobs. Contributing to their gathered information are the Defense Manpower Data Center, the US Department of Labor collaboration with the Department of Defense for the VOW to Hire Heroes Act, the RAND Corporations research report on Army KSAs, the Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force COOL Projects, and the website Careers in the military.

Finding the data

The military-to-civilian occupation crosswalks were created in January 2020 and downloaded from the O*NET Resource Center on January 20, 2019.

Job Title Cloud

We created the word cloud in our dashboard using all of the possible job title that O*NET suggets for this career classification. The size of each word indicates how frequently it appeared in a possible job title.