Skills and Occupation Mapping in Canada – The Occupational Skills and Information System (OaSIS)

The Labour Market Information Council (LMIC) has been working jointly with Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC) and Statistics Canada (STC) to describe jobs in terms of their skills requirements and other characteristics. First, a concept note was presented, outlining the anticipated approach towards mapping ESDC’s new Skills and Competencies Taxonomy to the National Occupational Classification (NOC) system. Next, certain key features and requirements for a Canadian system were explored. This included a review of the US O*NET system, focusing on the skills domains and the manual rating of skills by occupational analysts. Also included was an assessment of modern technologies for generating and/or updating occupational profiles — specifically, the large-scale collection of data from online job postings.

As Canada looks to develop its own occupational information system, it has the unique opportunity to study other international models for inspiration. In this LMI Insight Report, five such models are reviewed: O*NET (US), the UK Skills Taxonomy (UK), ESCO (Europe), JEDI (Australia) and Skills Framework (Singapore) to highlight their real-world data collection and methods for identifying the skills requirements of jobs.

Key Findings

• Employment and Social Development Canada, with support from Statistics Canada and the Labour Market Information Council is currently developing a database that maps skills to occupations, much like O*NET in the US, the UK Skills Taxonomy and Europe’s ESCO, to name a few.
• The development of this system draws on best practices from the different approaches assessed in previous LMI Insight Reports (e.g., job analyst approach, web scraping) and the lessons from various international examples.
• Focusing on the needs and requirements of a Canadian system, several features from worldwide examples stand out. First, recognition that using multiple lines of evidence (e.g., O*NET data, web scraped data and expert validation), enabled by comparisons of their complementarity, would improve the timely dissemination of occupational profiles. This would maintain the quality of information provided in the system as well as increasing its relevance to the Canadian context. Second, a series of “tagging” and “filtering” features would help Canadians navigate large data sets and improve the user experience.
• The Occupational Skills and Information System (OaSIS) will provide a framework of occupations and skills in the Canadian context. OaSIS will be constructed in two phases. The first phase will develop and validate profiles for almost 900 occupations. The second phase will see dissemination of information through a bilingual, searchable user interface.

Chosen excerpts by Job Market Monitor. Read the whole story @ LMI Insight Report no. 43, Searching for an OaSIS in the world of skills and occupation mapping – LMIC-CIMT