How Often Are O*NET Occupations Updated?

Source: O*NET Team. May 4th, 2015

O*NET (Occupational Information Network) is the definitive list of occupations in the world.

It is common folklore, that "on average, O*NET updates only around 100 occupation codes annually".  The innate researcher in me was always curious about this. Luckily, this was clarified for me early last week in a meeting with the O*NET team.

It turns out that this misconception is a product of horribly-handled communication and the need to simplify what is a complex issue.

The team produced the chart above, which documents the updates to O*NET occupations since 2003.

Light blue represents the number of occupations "comprehensively" updated by the O*NET survey. "Comprehensive" means that all the main components of the occupational profile were updated.

Dark blue represents the number of occupations that had some element of their O*NET information updated. These changes come from sources other than the survey, e.g. analyst ratings, customer & professional association input, government programs, transactional data, and Web research.

In 2010, 123 occupations were updated via surveys, while the remaining 874 occupational profiles of that year's total (997) had profile elements updated via non-survey methods.

So, all the occupation descriptions are updated every year.

Interesting.

What are your thoughts?