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For career information, this is the best of times, and it is also the worst of times.

This is the best of times because there is so much information to be had, delivered instantaneously and free of charge. The government's Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) finally is bringing order to the chaos of competing occupational taxonomies that have been used in the past. The Department of Labor's O*NET database, now Web-based and linked to SOC, provides a wealth of information (work tasks, skills, work values, interests, work context, etc.) describing over 1,200 occupations. America's Career InfoNet already provides a central repository of state-specific information and is tightly integrated with America's Job Bank, the Web's central clearinghouse for job openings.

Yet this is also the worst of times because so much of what we do in the workplace, or might consider doing, is not to be found in career information resources. I call this missing information "the invisible careers."

To be sure, the occupations included in conventional career information resources are very useful to young people as a convenient way of answering the question, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" These occupations also help college students when they think about choosing a major, although many academic advisors would like to uncouple the decision about a career from the decision about a major. But for adults, who already have a great amount of work experience and perhaps most of their formal higher education behind them - the people who may already be the largest group of career decision-makers - the typical mix of occupations has much less relevance.

This problem is an outgrowth of the emerging economy, in which the goal of work no longer is to perform the same set of tasks (perhaps for the same employer) over several decades. As Watersman et al. (1994) express it, "These days, both companies and employees are healthier if employees have multiple skills, if they can move easily across functional boundaries, if they are comfortable switching back and forth between regular duties and special projects, and if they feel comfortable moving on when the right fit within one company can no longer be found." These workers are in constant movement, and need help making decisions about where to move, but conventional career information resources describe occupations, and these workers are not changing occupations.

Instead, what these workers are doing at any given time may better be called a work function. These work functions often cut across the dividing lines that separate occupations in the conventional taxonomies such as the SOC, and the business world has needed to invent a whole new lexicon for describing them. For example, many workers have on their business cards titles such as "new product developer," "business analyst," or "consultant" - titles that are not likely to be found in the conventional career information resources.

As an experiment, I recently searched in America's Job Bank for "business analyst" and retrieved over 100 job postings in New Jersey alone. The title "business analyst" has a real meaning in the corporate world, and the job descriptions had many common elements, such as developing decision support models, gathering and documenting customers' requirements, and interacting with clients to analyze their business processes and goals. This term identifies a real work function.

Yet the employers who posted these job openings could not agree on what occupation was being represented by "business analyst." When you retrieve a job listing from America's Job Bank, you can usually find links at the bottom to America's Career InfoNet, such as "Wage and trend information related to this type of job." When I clicked on this link for business analyst job postings to find out what "type of job" they were, I retrieved information about "Systems analysts, electronic data processing," "Engineering, mathematical, and natural sciences managers," "Artists and related workers," and "All other computer scientists" - quite a range of occupations! It is conceivable that the job-posters were just being careless, but I think it is more likely that these matches were the closest they could make, because nothing in the occupational taxonomy used by America's Career InfoNet matches "business analyst" precisely (although "Management analysts" comes close), and because business analysts may come out of a variety of occupational backgrounds.

It is not just seasoned workers who think in terms of work functions (such as business analyst) rather than in terms of the traditional occupation. A major career information system that is a client of mine, SIGI PLUS, frequently receives requests from subscriber colleges to add an occupation called "consultant." Unfortunately, work functions such as "consultant" do not fit into the standard model of what makes an occupation, and so it is difficult to include them in the traditional career information resource.

Why do work functions defy the conventional model of an occupation? In fact, they resemble an occupation in most aspects: Their work tasks, skills, and work settings usually can be described; in some cases (such as new product developers) they even have a professional association, Product Development Management Association. The sticking point is that what is traditionally thought of as an occupation has an easily defined entry route. An engineer is someone who gets a degree in engineering and a license to be an engineer. A doctor goes to medical school, endures a clinical residency, and passes the licensing exam. A machinist completes an apprenticeship.

It is important to remember how this model of the occupation - largely representing the end result of a specific education/training process and perhaps licensure - came about. It is the outgrowth of an economy in which people chose a livelihood and then pursued it until retirement (perhaps even with the same employer). In such an economy, where career stability was the rule, people had a vested interest in creating barriers to the entry of potential competitors. A formal educational process, apprenticeship, and/or licensing requirement has served this purpose well. In some cases, membership in a professional organization has also been encouraged. To be sure, licensing serves to protect the public from workers who are unskilled or ignorant of the law, and "professionalism" may encourage an occupation to police the ethics of its members. We all want engineers who will build bridges that do not collapse, doctors who know where to find the appendix, and real estate agents who do not try to hoodwink their clients. But some licensing requirements or associations have been set up primarily for purposes of restraint of trade. As an extreme example, I might cite the Sandy Hook pilots who guide ships into New York Harbor: their licensing requirements have succeeded at restricting employment to one family for several generations. It is interesting to note how the real estate agents, who have relatively low educational requirements and a comparatively easy licensing procedure, felt the need to invent a quasi-occupation called Realtor(tm) that is more difficult for newcomers to penetrate.

The education industry has a stake in maintaining these barriers to occupational entry, since it provides the curricula that enable people to obtain the required credentials. (Note how whenever a newspaper publishes a "careers" supplement, the primary advertisers are colleges and technical schools.) And since occupational information has traditionally been purchased mainly by educational institutions, occupational taxonomies inevitably have been dominated by work roles that have clearly defined educational requirements. In my work for a career information publisher, I have seen countless letters from colleges saying, "We offer a major in X management. Why don't you add the occupation 'X manager'?"

I believe that the changing nature of our economy is making this kind of occupational taxonomy increasingly less relevant, especially to adults. Work functions without a clearly defined educational/training route, such as "business analyst," are appearing with greater frequency on resumes and in job postings. This is also true outside the corporate world. In academia, an invisible career I might cite is academic advisors, who have a professional association, NACADA, with over 4700 members but no formal entry requirements. In fact, people from a variety of backgrounds - engineers, artists, programmers, management experts - go into and sometimes back out of this academic work function, just as they might serve a stint as a product developer in a business setting.

Of course, some part of the reason for the disconnect between the occupational taxonomies and the "invisible" careers is that certain types of work are simply too new to have formal educational/training programs yet. This has always been true to some extent. For example, it is useful to remember that there were no colleges of engineering in this country until after the Civil War, and that before then engineering (other than for military uses) was done by a motley group of scientists with a practical bent, and by tinkerers or what we would now call technicians (surveyors, shipwrights, etc.) with scientific aptitude. In Andrew Carnegie's time nobody expected to receive a formal education in business management, with specializations such as human resources, marketing, and finance. In our own time, the extremely new work role of webmaster now finds workers from a variety of backgrounds - programmers with managerial interests, graphic artists with programming ability, graduates of MIS programs. On America's Job Bank, the job posters don't know where to classify it: "Engineering, mathematical, and natural sciences managers," "Computer programmers," "All other computer scientists," or "Management analysts." Yet even this new-hatched work function already has a professional association, World Organization of Webmasters, that is drafting a set of credentialing requirements, and "webmaster" has been written up by at least one of the more cutting-edge career information publishers (Chronicle Guidance Publications).

Nevertheless, everything we are reading and seeing about the new economy tells us that innovation in the workplace is no longer an occasional interruption to the normal steady state, but rather has become the norm. The most interesting, important, and lucrative work is to be done in roles that not only are too new to have formal credentialing processes, but may never have an elaborate educational entry route because the ability to perform the tasks depends not on mastery of a specific set of knowledges, but rather on the ability to learn quickly, synthesize across traditional boundaries of knowledge, and solve problems in innovative ways.

Observe how the educational industry has reinvented itself to offer increasingly short-term (and increasingly less formal) training. In the 1970s the new community colleges were offering two-year programs in technical subjects; now the on-line universities and proprietary schools are offering certification programs of a few weeks' duration for work functions such as webmaster, or even one-day courses to teach specific software tools - such as a programming language, database manager, or HTML editor - with no particular interest in the job title of the person who learns the skill. The more enlightened high schools and four-year colleges are emphasizing the need to teach fundamental skills such as critical thinking, verbal communication, mathematics, and problem-solving, so that graduates will be equipped to move into a rapid succession of work functions that require constant learning.

Now that the educational industry is changing, will it influence the career information industry as it has in the past? Will it cause the traditional occupation-centered model to change to one that acknowledges the importance of work functions? I hope so, but I see few signs so far. Ironically, the influence of the education market on career information can actually be expected to diminish, as government agencies and career services such as Monster Board are putting increasing amounts of career information on the Web, aimed at the entire citizenry, especially adult job-changers. Yet the developers who create the occupational taxonomies for the new Web-based resources seem as tied as ever to the traditional model of the occupation, largely because the sources they can turn to for low-cost content - such as O*NET - have not yet adopted a new model.

I suggest that the labor market experts who develop the next generation of occupational taxonomies do some primary research: compile lists of the job titles actually posted on America's Job Bank. Add some of these now invisible careers to the new occupational taxonomies, and add facts about them to the career information databases even though some fields in the database (such as "educational requirements") must be populated with information that is still in flux. Let the occupational information resources be tailored to fit what workers are actually doing. My experiment with AJB shows that the reverse is not working well.

Titusville, New Jersey, July 15, 2000

Reference

Watersman, R. et. al. Toward a career resilient work force. Harvard Business Review, July-August 1994, p. 88.

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