Visualization of Latent Components Assessed in O*Net Occupations (VOLCANO): A robust method for standardized conversion of occupational labels to scale ratio format

Occupations are typically characterized in nominal form, a format that limits options for hypothesis testing and data analysis. We drew upon ratings of knowledge, skills, and abilities for 966 occupations listed in the US Department of Labor’s Occupational Classification Network (O*NET) database to create an accessible, standardized multidimensional space in which occupations can be quantitatively localized and compared. Principal components analysis revealed that the occupation space comprises three main dimensions that correspond to 1) the required amount of education and training, 2) the degree to which an occupation falls within a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) discipline versus social sciences and humanities, and 3) whether occupations are more mathematically or health-related. Additional occupational spaces reflecting cognitive versus labour-oriented categories were created for finer grained characterization of dimensions within occupational sets defined by higher or lower required educational preparation. Data-driven groupings of related occupations were obtained with hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA). Proof-of-principle was demonstrated with a real-world dataset (470 participants from the Nathan Kline Institute – Rockland Sample; NKI-RS), whereby verbal and non-verbal abilities—as assessed by standardized testing—were related to the STEM versus social sciences and humanities dimension. Visualization of Latent Components Assessed in O*Net Occupations (VOLCANO) is provided to the research community as a freely accessible tool, along with a shiny app for users to extract quantitative scores along the relevant dimensions. VOLCANO brings much-needed standardization to unwieldy occupational data. Moreover, it can be used to create new occupational spaces customized to specific research domains.