The Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System is a
United States
The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...
government system of classifying
occupation
Occupation commonly refers to:
*Occupation (human activity), or job, one's role in society, often a regular activity performed for payment
*Occupation (protest), political demonstration by holding public or symbolic spaces
*Military occupation, th ...
s. It is used by U.S. federal government agencies collecting occupational data, enabling comparison of occupations across data sets. It is designed to cover all occupations in which work is performed for pay or profit, reflecting the current occupational structure in the United States. The 2010 SOC includes 840 occupational types.
Users of occupational data include government program managers, industrial and labor relations practitioners, students considering career training, job seekers, vocational training schools, and employers wishing to set salary scales or locate a new plant.
The SOC codes have a hierarchical format, so for example the code "15-0000" refers to occupations in the "Computer and Mathematical Occupations" category, and "15-1130" is a subset for "Software Developers and Programmers".
The SOC does not categorize industries or employers. There are parallel category systems for industries used with SOC data, most commonly
NAICS
The North American Industry Classification System or NAICS () is a classification of business establishments by type of economic activity (process of production). It is used by government and business in Canada, Mexico, and the United States of A ...
.
Other countries
National variants of the SOC are used by the governments of the
United Kingdom
The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, commonly known as the United Kingdom (UK) or Britain, is a country in Europe, off the north-western coast of the continental mainland. It comprises England, Scotland, Wales and North ...
,
Canada
Canada is a country in North America. Its ten provinces and three territories extend from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean and northward into the Arctic Ocean, covering over , making it the world's second-largest country by tot ...
,
Spain
, image_flag = Bandera de España.svg
, image_coat = Escudo de España (mazonado).svg
, national_motto = ''Plus ultra'' (Latin)(English: "Further Beyond")
, national_anthem = (English: "Royal March")
, i ...
the
Philippines
The Philippines (; fil, Pilipinas, links=no), officially the Republic of the Philippines ( fil, Republika ng Pilipinas, links=no),
* bik, Republika kan Filipinas
* ceb, Republika sa Pilipinas
* cbk, República de Filipinas
* hil, Republ ...
, and
Singapore
Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...
.
Classifications
*
Architecture and engineering occupations
*
Arts
The arts are a very wide range of human practices of creative expression, storytelling and cultural participation. They encompass multiple diverse and plural modes of thinking, doing and being, in an extremely broad range of media. Both hi ...
,
design
A design is a plan or specification for the construction of an object or system or for the implementation of an activity or process or the result of that plan or specification in the form of a prototype, product, or process. The verb ''to design'' ...
,
entertainment
Entertainment is a form of activity that holds the attention and interest of an audience or gives pleasure and delight. It can be an idea or a task, but is more likely to be one of the activities or events that have developed over thousa ...
,
sports
Sport pertains to any form of competitive physical activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve physical ability and skills while providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators. Sports can, th ...
, and
media occupations
*
Building and grounds cleaning and maintenance occupations
*
Business
Business is the practice of making one's living or making money by producing or Trade, buying and selling Product (business), products (such as goods and Service (economics), services). It is also "any activity or enterprise entered into for pr ...
and
financial operations occupations
*
Community and social services occupations
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as place, norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, tow ...
*
Computer and mathematical occupations
*
Construction and extraction occupations
Construction is a general term meaning the art and science to form objects, systems, or organizations,"Construction" def. 1.a. 1.b. and 1.c. ''Oxford English Dictionary'' Second Edition on CD-ROM (v. 4.0) Oxford University Press 2009 and co ...
*
Education, training, and library occupations
*
Farming, fishing, and forestry occupations
*
Food preparation and serving related occupations
*
Healthcare practitioners and technical occupations
*
Healthcare support occupations
*
Installation, maintenance, and repair occupations
*
Legal occupations
*
Life, physical, and social science occupations
*
Management occupations
*
Military specific occupations
*
Office and administrative support occupations
An office is a space where an organization's employees perform administrative work in order to support and realize objects and goals of the organization. The word "office" may also denote a position within an organization with specific du ...
*
Personal care and service occupations
Personal may refer to:
Aspects of persons' respective individualities
* Privacy
* Personality
* Personal, personal advertisement, variety of classified advertisement used to find romance or friendship
Companies
* Personal, Inc., a Washington, ...
*
Production occupations
Production may refer to:
Economics and business
* Production (economics)
* Production, the act of manufacturing goods
* Production, in the outline of industrial organization, the act of making products (goods and services)
* Production as a stat ...
*
Protective service occupations
Protection is any measure taken to guard a thing against damage caused by outside forces. Protection can be provided to physical objects, including organisms, to systems, and to intangible things like civil and political rights. Although th ...
*
Sales and related occupations
*
Transportation and material moving occupations
History
The SOC was established in 1977, and revised by a committee representing specialists from across U.S. government agencies in the 1990s. SOC codes were updated again in 2010, and on November 28, 2017, the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) published a Federal Register notice detailing the final decisions for the 2018 SOC.
See also
*
Designation of workers by collar color
Collar color is a set of terms denoting groups of working individuals based on the colors of their collars worn at work. These can commonly reflect one's occupation within a broad class, or sometimes gender; at least in the late 20th and 21st cent ...
*
Dictionary of Occupational Titles
The ''Dictionary of Occupational Titles'' or D-O-T (DOT) refers to a publication produced by the United States Department of Labor which helped employers, government officials, and workforce development professionals to define over 13,000 differen ...
(DOT) First Published 1938. Last complete update 1977. Last revised edition published (DOT, 4th ed.) in 1991. Now out of print, the DOT is used by
Administrative Law Judge
An administrative law judge (ALJ) in the United States is a judge and trier of fact who both presides over trials and adjudicates claims or disputes involving administrative law. ALJs can administer oaths, take testimony, rule on questions of evi ...
s (as required by statute) to encode physical requirements of occupations to make Occupational Law determinations, and for research using its detail over the period covered.
*
International Standard Classification of Occupations
The International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) is an International Labour Organization (ILO) classification structure for organizing information on labour and jobs. It is part of the international family of economic and social ...
*
National Occupational Classification
National Occupational Classification, or NOC, is a systematic Taxonomy (general), taxonomy of all occupations in the Economy of Canada, Canadian labour market. As a Canadian government publication it is concurrently published in French as Classifi ...
(NOC) (in Canada)
*
Occupational Information Network The Occupational Information Network (O*NET) is a free online database that contains hundreds of job definitions to help students, job seekers, businesses and workforce development professionals to understand today's world of work in the United Stat ...
(O*NET) Comprehensive information based largely on input from individuals who have personally performed over 970 'data-level' occupational categories; taxonomic information about 40 'non-data-level' categories (970+ 40 = a total of 1010 occupations); includes 840 SOC categories and many specialized O*NET-SOC categories.
*
Occupational Outlook Handbook
The ''Occupational Outlook Handbook'' (OOH) is a publication of the United States Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics that includes information about the nature of work, working conditions, training and education, earnings and job ou ...
(OOH) Created and maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS)
References
{{reflist, 30em
* U.S. Department of Labor (2000). ''Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) Manual'' (2000 ed.). Washington, D.C.
External links
The Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) System
Occupations
Employment classifications