Career Cluster

Career clusters exist so that exploration can start somewhere smaller than "every job that exists". Instead of choosing among thousands of occupations, a student chooses among 14 families — Health and Human Services, Manufacturing and Supply Chain, Education, and so on — and then explores inside the ones that fit.

The framework is maintained by Advance CTE and was last revised in 2024, when the long-standing 16 clusters were restructured into 14. It is the taxonomy most US state education agencies build their career-exploration standards around, which is why a platform that reports results against it can be checked against those standards directly.

A cluster is not the same as an industry. Industry groups employers by what they sell; a cluster groups occupations by the skills they demand. An accountant works in almost every industry and sits in one cluster.