The Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP) provides a hierarchy that supports the tracking and reporting of fields of study and program completions activity. CIP codes are managed by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system is a hierarchy used to classify workers into occupational categories. SOC codes are managed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

The CIP-to-SOC mapping connects educational programs with target occupations. Lightcast's CIP-to-SOC mapping is modified from the National Center for Education Statistics’ CIP-to-SOC mapping.

Lightcast has a consulting team that works with hundreds of colleges and universities to develop and align their programs with their state and local economies. With that collaboration we’ve been able to further the relevance and alignment of our traditional CIP-to-SOC map. In some instances, you may notice fewer occupations mapped to programs in order to focus on the occupations you’re training for and avoiding ones that may not have been relevant to the skills and training that students are prepared with. In other cases, occupations have been added to show the true demand for those students based on the skills they’ve gained. This improved mapping helps align programs with the true workforce demand.

Analyst uses the CIP-to-SOC mapping to to help match completions to occupation data, and to help determine similar programs and similar occupations. For example, in the Program Overview in Analyst, when a user enters one or more CIPs they are given similar programs in one section of the report and target occupations in another. Both of these are based off the CIP-to-SOC mapping. Another example is the Occupation Overview Report. A user enters a SOC and as part of the report they are given the top programs by completions that could supply demand for this occupation. The programs identified are based off our CIP-to-SOC mapping.

Some CIP codes do not appear in the mapping, typically because the programs they identify are too generic to map to specific occupations. They include the following two-digit codes and all the specific codes under them in the CIP hierarchy:

There are also about 75 specific SOC codes which are not mapped to by any CIP code, typically because the occupations they denote are unspecific, learned on the job, or otherwise occupations not trained for in college programs. Here is a small sample of such codes: