Overview
Lightcast maintains an extensive library of more than 75,000 job titles. While roles are often categorized in helpful ways through SOC or O*NET, those sources do not reflect the niche and constantly evolving nature of jobs in today’s economy. Lightcast Titles reflect the language used by employers in job postings, users gain a real-time view of new and emerging roles in the workforce. In combination with the Lightcast Occupation taxonomy and Lightcast Skills they offer a useful insight into the labor market.
In general, Job Titles are what a person in a role is called, as opposed to their Occupation, which is better described as what they actually do. The taxonomic trio is completed by Skills, describe the tasks and competencies expected in performance of the role.
Advantages of using Lightcast Titles:
Recency: Lightcast Titles are updated every few weeks to keep pace with shifting roles in the labor market.
Market alignment: Since Lightcast Titles are developed from standardization of language used by employers, users have an immediate and "primary source" depiction of how these titles are evolving in the labor market.
Methodology:
The titles start as “raw titles” that have been pulled directly from the title field of a posting or profile. For example, a Facebook job posting may list the job title as “Data Science Manager, Messenger.” This would be the raw title.
Though these raw titles may each be considered unique by computer standards, we often find that two or more titles are a match, despite a small discontinuity such as a space or a period. To solve the problem we find job titles with misspellings, acronyms, industrial jargon, etc. or we dive deeper into the postings to understand the true function of the job and normalize these to the corresponding Lightcast Title.
Each posting is tagged with the closest standard title in the system. Following the example above, the job title would be cut down to read “Data Science Manager”.
The Lightcast Titles are now available in Lightcast tools.
See also: Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy - This taxonomy further standardizes the natural language of Job Titles into categories for ease of analysis.