Occupation
A specific type of work or field — registered nurse, electrician, musician. An occupation describes what the work is, independently of who employs you, what they pay, or how long you stay.
Occupation is the unit the labour market is actually measured in. The US federal government assigns every occupation a Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) code, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes employment and wage data against those codes — which is why a wage figure can be quoted for an occupation but not for a job title someone invented at one company.
The distinction that matters when you are exploring: you can hold several different jobs in the same occupation, and you can change occupation without changing career. A nurse who moves from one hospital to another has changed job. A nurse who becomes a nurse educator has changed occupation while staying in the same career.
JobCannon codes every career in its library to an O*NET-SOC occupation, which is how interest results connect to real wage and education data instead of to a description someone wrote.
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