After business hours on April 19th 2024, Lightcast will enhance the classification of job postings to O*NET-SOC 2019 taxonomy. This enhancement will update all US job postings and the HWOL data series.
What should you expect?
All historic HWOL postings and future job postings data will be better coded using the new system, so the new data will be consistent for time series analysis. The new classification offers more granularity and greater precision, distinguishing between different specialties. For instance coding fewer postings to the "All Other” and "Unclassified" O*NET codes. Remarkably, the “Unclassified” occupation will be reduced by 25%.
More detailed analysis of the changes:
There are a couple of ways to analyze changes across the data such as comparing shifts in the total job counts for occupations or changes in the rankings for an occupation. The data analysis below is preliminary and subject to change as we finalize the data in the coming days.
The major group Community and Social Service Occupations will see the greatest uptick in ad volume. The majority of the addition postings are mostly behavioral occupations reclassified from "Management Occupations" and Home health aides previously classified in "Healthcare Support" occupations.
The major group Business and Financial Operations will also see an increase in postings as many new * emerging job titles were coded into this group. Also, some reclassification of project manager titles that were previously in the "Management Occupations" and the "Computer and Mathematical" families. There will also be a reclassification of some business development titles from the "Sales and Related" major group.
The Office and Administrative Support major group will gain postings from various improvements to coding. Some sales-related titles, and some shipping administrative support titles. Another miscode correction will see HR Assistant titles correctly coded to this major group, instead of management occupations.
The major group that will experience the greatest loss of postings under the new classifier is Architecture and Engineering. These losses are accounted for by maintenance worker titles which will be reclassified into the "Installation, Maintenance and Repair" group. Some process and system engineering titles have been reclassified to the "Computer and Mathematical occupations" as we improve our classification.
The Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations major group will experience some loss of postings numbers. These are accounted for by a reclassification of some roles that are more office based than patient care based, such as 'patient coordinators' which will move from Healthcare into “Medical and health services managers". Within the Healthcare Practitioners group, some significant improvements to coding have been made, for example Nurse Practitioner and Acute Care Nurse titles will now be more correctly coded to the practitioner and acute care occupations, no longer to the Registered Nurse category.
Computer & Mathematical have some small shifts as job titles like 'Geek Squad' - will be reclassified from "Computer User Support Specialists" into telecommunications.
The new classification system has also significantly improved coding to Farming, Fishing and Forestry occupations along with Construction and Extraction occupations and Military Occupations.
The percentage of postings remaining as Occupation "Unclassified" has decreased significantly. Simply put, the new classifier understands more new and emerging jobs titles, and allows for more detail to better classify postings into the 2019 SOC and O*NET taxonomy.
The chart below shows the anticipated shift in ad volume for each job family Nationwide over 2023.
Now, let’s explore the changes at changes for some of the top occupations Nationwide. The chart below shows the current top 10 occupations in 2023 and the expected shifts for each. Here are some notable shifts:
The Manager’s All Other ad volume will drop significantly as the new classifier codes new emerging job titles into their more distinct/ exacting managerial and related occupation such as General and Operations Managers
Sales Representative, Wholesale and Manufacturing, Except Technical and Scientific Products lose jobs to similar sales occupations that we are now better at tagging criteria for such as Sales Representatives of Services, Except Advertising, Insurance, Financial Services, and Travel.
Similarly, Stockers and Order fillers will drop as some warehouse worker jobs moved to Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, Hand and Shipping, Receiving, and Inventory Clerks and Order Clerks.
Secretaries and Administrative Assistants, Except Legal, Medical, and Executive will see an uptick with thousands of new titles going into this occupation. The uptick correlates to the drop in medical secretaries. As we are now better able to distinguish between medical and non-medical administrative roles.
Why are we doing this?
We’ve simplified and streamlined our occupational coding process. Our new classifier offers the best possible coding with over 90% accuracy levels and quicker updates for fixes or improvements.
What are the changes?
Great news, Lightcast and The Conference Board will provide all of the reprocessed historical data (monthly data files) going back to January 2022 and provide the revised Publication Series files for the May 8th HWOL publication date. The revised Index data will be forthcoming. If you need any help accessing any of your data files or if you would like any additional data, please let us know. We want to exceed your expectations with this enhancement.
This article will be updated as more data analysis becomes available. For more specific details on all the changes in the data please refer to this change report.
Please contact your account manager, Jeanne Shu, or [email protected] for more information about the changes or any assistance with the data.