Occupations and areas

Occupations: SOC 2020

Occupations are identified by their SOC 2020 unit group - a four-digit code from the ONS Standard Occupational Classification. There are 412 unit groups. Each belongs to a hierarchy you get from /v1/occupations/{soc}:

5      Skilled trades occupations                         major group
53     Skilled construction and building trades           sub-major group
531    Construction and building trades                   minor group
5315   Plumbers and heating and ventilating installers…   unit group

Pay, employment and skills are all published at the unit-group level.

What the job involves

/v1/occupations/{soc} includes about: the ONS description of the occupation and its typical tasks, from SOC 2020 Volume 1. Tasks are written as continuations of "Job holders in this occupation..." - "examines drawings and specifications to determine layout of system" - so they start in lower case. Show them as a list.

Volume 1 also describes typical entry routes and qualifications. These are not served yet; they will come alongside apprenticeship data.

Finding a code from a job title

/v1/occupations/search?q= matches against the ONS coding index: about 32,000 job titles, each assigned to a unit group by ONS. It:

• ranks an exact match first, then fuzzy matches by similarity;
• returns each unit group once, with the title that matched it best;
• tolerates misspellings, possessives and punctuation ("plumer", "plumbers mate", "plumber's mate").

Some titles mean different jobs in different settings, and the index records the distinction as a qualifier. "Engineer" qualified coal mine: below ground is a maintenance fitter (5223); qualified professional, electronic it is an electronics engineer (2124). Show qualifiers to users when present.

A unit group title can be broad. If a user types "nurse", several unit groups are plausible; letting the user choose from the top matches gives much better results than taking the first.

Skills: a related classification

Skills come from ESCO, the European Commission's classification. ESCO is joined to SOC through the international ISCO-08 classification, which the ONS coding index already maps every unit group to. Several UK unit groups can share an ISCO-08 group, so skills describe related occupations rather than exact equivalents. Each skills response says this in its derivation field.

Skills are available for 409 of the 412 unit groups. See What is and isn't available.

Areas

Pass ?area= with one of these names:

GSS codes (for example E12000007 for London) are accepted too, and every response gives both.

What is available where

Not every kind of data exists for every area. ONS does not publish occupation-level figures below these levels.

Asking for an area that is not available returns 400 with an explanation and the list of areas that are.

Regional pay is by workplace - the region where the job is, not where the employee lives.