Comparing the DOT, O*NET and eDOT

DICTIONARY OF OCCUPATIONAL TITLES

The U.S. government released its first Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) in 1939, a time of high and sustained unemployment. The DOT was designed to aid expanding public works projects in the United States.

The DOT was created to assist the:

• unemployed
• disabled
• mid-life career changer

Classification System

The DOT originally contained approximately 17,500 definitions coded according to occupational classification. Blocks of jobs were assigned codes that placed them into one of 550 occupational groups and indicated whether the jobs were skilled, semi-skilled or unskilled occupations.

Crosswalks

In order to use data from different labor force surveys, the government created crosswalks in the 1940s.

Crosswalk

A way to link two or more classification systems.

In this case, the classification systems are lists of types of jobs.

These lists have

• a job title
• a job description and
• an identification number

The job descriptions are compared to show the matching numbers for each list.

Crosswalk example. For the job title Teacher Secondary School, the current crosswalks are:

• eDOT: 091.227-010
• OEWS: 31308
• O*NET: 25-2031.00
• SOC: 253021

Revision

The third edition of the DOT was published in 1965. Then the Census occupational classification system was restructured, and the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) system was born.

Standard Occupational Classification (SOC)

Designed to include ALL occupations for which work was performed for pay, the SOC divided positions into 22 divisions with 64 major occupational groups. The latest version of the SOC system was released in 2018. All workers are classified into one of 867 detailed occupations according to their occupational definition. To facilitate classification, detailed occupations are combined to form 459 broad occupations, 98 minor groups, and 23 major groups. Detailed occupations in the SOC with similar job duties, and in some cases skills, education, and/or training, are grouped together. These detailed occupations are each given a 6-digit code. Miscellaneous or "catch-all" occupations end with the number "99".

The SOC Manual is periodically revised to serve as a crosswalk, linking the different job classification systems released by various government offices.

1977 DOT

The modern version of the DOT was first published in 1977.

The DOT then:

• classified 13,000 occupations
• provided narrative descriptions of tasks, tools, duties and working conditions
• coded jobs by level of complexity in dealing with "data, people and things"
• used 9 major occupational groups (for example, clerical and sales occupations were clustered into one group)

Q: Who collected data for the DOT?

A: Analysts in field offices across the country interviewed and observed a few individuals in every job to create the DOT analyses.