Occupation of person with recent work experience

Status: This standard was approved as a departmental standard on April 20, 2015.

Definition

Occupation refers to the kind of work performed in a job, a job being all the tasks carried out by a particular worker to complete his or her duties. An occupation is a set of jobs that are sufficiently similar in work performed.

Kind of work is described in terms of tasks, duties and responsibilities, often including factors such as materials processed or used, the industrial processes used, the equipment used, and the products or services provided. Occupations are generally homogeneous with respect to skill type and skill level.

Occupation applies to the contribution of labour to that part of economic activity that is within the production boundary defined for the System of National Accounts.

Person with recent work experience refers to persons 15 years and over who were employed at some point during a reference period such as a year or more, regardless of labour force status during the survey's reference week or reference day.

Usage

Though "occupation" applies to jobs, a person can be assigned an occupation classification based on the occupation of a job that he or she currently performs or that he or she performed in the past.

Occupation can apply to a person's main job or other jobs. However, for occupation to be collected through a survey, a person must be associated with a job.

For the Census of Population/National Household Survey, occupation of person usually relates to the job the person held in the reference week. However, if the person did not work during that week but had worked at some time since January 1 of the prior year, the information relates to the job held longest during that period. Persons with two or more jobs were to report the information for the job at which they worked the most hours.

Job, as described in this standard, is compatible with the definition of job in the System of National Accounts (SNA). The definitions states that:

The agreement between an employee and the employer defines a job and each self-employed person has a job. The number of jobs in the economy thus exceeds the number of persons employed to the extent that some employees have more than one job.

Sources:

European Communities, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations and World Bank, System of National Accounts 2008 (New York, 2009).

Conformity to relevant internationally recognized standards

This standard uses the NOC classification and definition of occupation. The classification and its underlying principles are similar to the International Labour Office's (ILO) International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO). ISCO's definition of an occupation as "a set of jobs whose main tasks and duties are characterized by a high degree of similarity" is equivalent to the definition found in this standard. However, ISCO's application is not limited by the production boundary defined for the System of National Accounts (SNA), allowing it to include subsistence activity which is excluded from this standard. The National Occupational Classification for Statistics is not directly based on ISCO but has similar underlying principles of classification that allow for comparison across the two classification systems.

The description of job used in this standard is compatible with the definition of job in the SNA.

Sources:

International Labour Office, Ralf Hussmanns, Farhad Mehran, and Vijay Verma, "Surveys of economically active population, employment, unemployment and underemployment: An ILO manual on concepts and methods" (Geneva, 1990).

European Commission, International Monetary Fund, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, United Nations and World Bank, System of National Accounts 2008 (New York, 2009).

Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Statistical Division, United Nations, "Principles and Recommendations for Population and Housing Censuses", Revision 2 (New York, 2008).

Classifications

Additional information

See:

Relation to previous version

  • Occupation of person with recent work experience April 20, 2015 to current

    This is the current standard.

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