Definitions - Definitions for terms included in the Occupational Mobility Explorer.

Bachelor's Degree or Higher

An occupation is categorized as requiring a bachelor's degree or higher if any of the following are true: its typical entry-level education is a master's, doctoral, or professional degree; more than 80 percent of online job postings specifying a minimum education request a bachelor's degree; or at least five years of work experience in a related occupation is generally required. We also categorize occupations as such if their typical entry-level education is a bachelor's degree and they have fewer than 100 online job postings specifying a minimum education level.

Current Occupation

When building a career path, you have the choice to start either from a current occupation or a destination occupation. Starting with a current occupation means that you will add higher-paying occupations to your career path to understand how someone in that occupation might advance based on their existing skills and experience. For example, you may choose to build a path using a current occupation if you are a job seeker looking to advance your career or a career adviser advising job seekers on potential career paths.

Destination Occupation

You can also begin building a career path to your destination occupation. Starting with your destination means that you will add lower-paying occupations to your career path to explore the career paths one can take to reach a destination occupation. This feature may also be helpful for employers seeking to expand their applicant pools and recruit from occupations that they may not have previously considered.

Hourly Wage

The hourly wage is the median (or midpoint) hourly wage for workers in an occupation in a given geography. For salaried occupations that do not generally entail full-time, year-round work, we divide the annual median wage by 2,080 (i.e., 40 hours per week and 52 weeks per year) to estimate an hourly wage.

Metro and Nonmetro Area Definitions

The metro and nonmetro areas available in this tool are dictated by the wage and employment data provided through the Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The geographic definitions are detailed here and are based on the Office of Management and Budget's Bulletin No. 17-01.

Projected Growth Rate

The percent change in the number of jobs anticipated for an occupation nationally from 2022 to 2032.

Skill Intensity

For a given occupation, the skill intensity is the share of online job postings requesting a given skill relative to the number of online job postings requesting at least one skill. Online job postings that specify no skills are excluded from this calculation. Where there are at least 250 online job postings in a given state specifying at least one skill, we use state-level data. We use data from the state's broader census division if this minimum sample of 250 is not met at the state level but is met at the census division level. Occupations with an inadequate sample at both the state and the census division levels are excluded from the tool.

Skill Similarity

Each pair of occupations is classified as having a high, medium, or low skill similarity based on the cosine similarity score of the 25 most requested skills in online job postings for each occupation. The cosine similarity score ranges from 0 to 1 and reflects not only the degree to which the top-25 skills for two occupations overlap but also the skill intensity associated with the overlapping and nonoverlapping skills. Occupations without at least 25 skills are dropped from the tool. The high category includes pairs with a cosine similarity score of at least 0.75; the medium category includes pairs with a score of at least 0.50 but less than 0.75; and the low category includes pairs with a score below 0.50.

Wage Increase

The percent increase calculated from the median hourly wage of the higher-paying occupation relative to the median hourly wage of the lower-paying occupation in the selected pair.

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