How Jobs Are Defined

Visit an online job posting site, or open the "Jobs Classified" or "Help Wanted" section of a daily newspaper and you could find a variety of job ads. These are ads placed by employers for job openings. Just as there are many different types of employers (e.g., retail stores, autobody shops, Internet providers) there are as many, if not more, types of jobs (e.g., cashiers, inventory clerks, mechanics, brake specialists, systems analysts, programmers, marketers). In fact, there are tens of thousands of different types of jobs in the Ontario labour market. Many of these jobs are quite different from one another. For example, there is a distinct difference between a nurse and a truck driver. On the other hand, there are jobs that share many similar attributes - saucier, sous-chef, patissier and pasta chef are all chefs. The goal of a classification system is to group similar occupations together in a manner that clearly highlights the distinctiveness of that group. The National Occupational Classification system, or NOC, does exactly this by grouping occupations according to their skill level and skill type.

For the NOC a large research project was undertaken by Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. Firms in all areas of Canada's economy were surveyed to collect information on their jobs, industry studies were undertaken, professional associations were contacted, and specialists in analysis and classification of jobs were employed.

The term "occupation" is used in the title of the Classification rather than job because the occupation titles refer to types of work that are found in groups of families of closely related jobs that have similar education and training requirements, hence the use of the term occupation. This can be illustrated with the occupation "computer programmers". In the Classification, the following examples of titles are assigned to this occupation: application programmer, business programmer, computer programmer, operating system programmer, programmer analyst, scientific programmer, software programmer and system programmer. In all, there are 520 occupational groups and approximately 36,000 titles covered by the NOC.

Skill level is defined as the amount and type of education required to perform the duties of the job, and skill type is defined as the type of work performed. In developing the classification, the fact that jobs of a particular type are concentrated in certain parts of the economy has also been taken into account.