Random Occupation Generator

What the random occupation generator does

You need somebody to do something for a living. A character in chapter two, a name on a worksheet, a persona for a design review, a prompt for a class that has gone quiet.

Press the button and you get a job.

Some of what comes back will be ordinary. Accountant. Actor. Zoologist. And then something like adhesive bonding machine tender turns up and does not sound like a real job at all.

It is a real job. It sounds strange for a reason, and the reason is the most interesting thing on this page.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. One if you are deciding, a batch if you are browsing.
2. Press Generate. A fresh draw every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

The book that tried to write down every job in America

In 1939 the United States Department of Labor published a book with an ambition that nobody has been mad enough to repeat.

It was called the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, and the idea was to write down every job. Not a list of names. Descriptions. What the work actually consisted of, task by task, so that an employment office in one state and an employment office in another could use the same words for the same job and mean the same thing.

The Depression had made this urgent. Millions of people needed work, the government was in the business of matching them to it, and it turned out you cannot match anybody to anything if the word "operator" means four different jobs in four different towns.

So they went and looked.

That is the part worth sitting with. The way you find out what a job involves is that a person goes to the place where the job happens and watches somebody do it, and asks questions, and writes it down. The final revision of the book, in 1991, took a decade and more than forty job analysts working out of five centres around the country. Everything in it came from someone standing there with a notebook.

By the end it ran to over twelve thousand occupations.

The Dictionary is out of print now. The Labor Department stopped maintaining it after 1991 and replaced it with a database. But it never quite went away, and where it survives is somewhere you would not expect: the Social Security Administration still reaches for it when deciding whether someone claiming disability could do some other kind of work. A book written on foot, finished before most of the modern economy existed, is still quietly deciding things about people's lives.

Data, People, Things

Now the part where a government publication accidentally does philosophy.

Every job in the Dictionary got a nine digit code. The first three said what field you were in. The last three separated you from everyone else with the same first six. Ordinary filing.

The middle three are the strange ones.

The Dictionary is built on a claim, stated flatly in its own appendix and never really argued for: every job requires a worker to function, to some degree, in relation to Data, People and Things. That is it. That is the whole theory of work. Everything anyone has ever been paid to do is some combination of handling information, handling human beings, and handling objects.

And then, having asserted that, they rated every job on all three. One digit each, and the lower the number the more complex the work:

• Data runs from synthesizing at the top, down through coordinating, analyzing, compiling, computing, copying, and comparing at the bottom.
• People runs from mentoring, down through negotiating, instructing, supervising, diverting, persuading, speaking-signaling, serving, and finally taking instructions and helping.
• Things runs from setting up, down through precision working, operating-controlling, driving-operating, manipulating, tending, feeding-offbearing, and handling.

Read those lists again and notice what has happened. Somebody decided that synthesizing information is harder than comparing it, that mentoring a person is a deeper act than serving them, and that setting a machine up takes more of you than handling one. Those are not measurements. They are judgements about the worth of human activity, and they were assigned a digit and printed by a government.

A security guard came out as 667. Comparing, in relation to data. Speaking and signaling, in relation to people. Handling, in relation to things. Three digits, and the whole of the work is supposedly in there.

The remarkable thing is that the Dictionary knew. Tucked into the same appendix, in the middle of explaining the system, is an admission that the People scale is somewhat arbitrary, that it overlaps too much to be a real hierarchy, and that it should only be treated as one in the loosest sense. They built the thing, published it, used it for fifty years, and told you in the small print that one leg of it was a guess.

You will not find a more honest paragraph in any taxonomy anywhere.

Why there is an adhesive bonding machine tender in here

Go back to the word that did not sound like a real job.

Tender. Not tender as in soft, and not tender as in an offer. Tender as in one who tends. It is an odd word to find in a job title in the twenty-first century, and it is there because it is a technical term.

Look back at the Things list. Fifth one down, between manipulating and feeding-offbearing: tending.

Tending is a specific thing. You are not operating the machine, because operating means you are controlling how it runs. You are not setting it up, because that is the skilled end of the scale. You are tending it. The machine does the work, it has been started by somebody else, and your job is to watch it, feed it, notice when it goes wrong, and adjust it when it does. You are in a relationship with a machine in which the machine is doing the verb and you are keeping it company.

So an adhesive bonding machine tender is not a made-up sounding job. It is a precisely specified one. There is a machine that glues things. Somebody stands with it. That person's relationship to the object is Tending, which is level five, and the title says so out loud to anyone who knows the code.

Once you see it you will start finding it everywhere in the list. Graders and sorters and setters and operators and handlers are not casual English. They are positions on a scale that somebody drew up in 1939, still sitting inside the job titles, doing their work quietly decades after the book that defined them went out of print.

And underneath every one of them is the same fact. Somebody went and watched a person stand next to a machine that glues things, and thought it was worth writing down.

Where these come from

The occupations are drawn from a list our team researched and checked by hand against the standard occupational classifications, so the titles are the real ones rather than invented approximations. Your browser picks from them at random. Nothing you do here leaves your device.

Ways people actually use this

• Characters. A random job is the fastest way past a blank character. What somebody does all day decides how they talk, when they are free, what they notice walking into a room, and what they are tired of. Give the innkeeper a real trade and half the work is done.
• Teaching. Careers lessons collapse into doctor, lawyer, engineer. Pull a handful at random and you get agricultural inspector, animator, actuary, aircraft cargo handling supervisor. Most of the working world is jobs nobody thinks to mention.
• Personas and testing. Design reviews drift toward imagining users who are basically the design team. A random occupation is a cheap way to put somebody else in the room.
• Prompts and icebreakers. Ask a room what a wood patternmaker does. Somebody will know. That person will be delighted to be asked.
• Finding out what you do not know. Most people can name perhaps thirty jobs. There are thousands. Pull a few and you will meet work that has been going on your whole life without you noticing.

Questions people ask

Are these all real jobs?

Yes. They come from the standard occupational classifications, which is to say they are the titles governments and statisticians actually use to count employment. The strange ones are usually the most real, because a title that specific only exists because somebody went and documented the work.

Why are there jobs in here that barely exist any more, like switchboard operator?

Because occupational classifications move slowly and deliberately. A title stays in long after the work thins out, partly so that statisticians can compare this decade with the last one, and partly because "barely exists" and "does not exist" are very different things to the people still doing it. Somebody is still operating a switchboard somewhere this afternoon.

Is it true that "computer" used to be a job title?

It is, and for a long time. A computer was a person who computed, usually with a desk machine and a great deal of patience, and the work was often done by women in large rooms. The word transferred to the machine, and the job title went with it. That is the general pattern: the tool takes the name of the person it replaced.

How many jobs are there, really?

It depends entirely on who is counting and what they are counting for. The Dictionary of Occupational Titles listed over twelve thousand because it was trying to describe individual jobs precisely enough to place a person into one. Modern classifications group much harder, because they are built for statistics rather than for matchmaking, and a statistician does not want twelve thousand categories. Both answers are correct. They are answers to different questions.

Why do some titles sound so bureaucratic?

Because they were written to be unambiguous rather than to be attractive. "Aircraft cargo handling supervisor" is nobody's business card. It is a description precise enough that two offices in different states will agree on what it means, which was the entire point of writing them down.

Can the same job come up twice?

Not within a single draw. Ask for ten and you get ten different ones. Press again and everything is back in play.

References

1. United States Department of Labor (1991). Appendix B: Explanation of Data, People, and Things. Dictionary of Occupational Titles, fourth edition revised. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oalj/PUBLIC/DOT/REFERENCES/DOTAPPB
2. United States Department of Labor (1991). Parts of the Occupational Definition. Dictionary of Occupational Titles, fourth edition revised. https://www.oalj.dol.gov/PUBLIC/DOT/REFERENCES/DOTPARTS.HTM
3. Schaerfl, R. A. (1991). Foreword. Dictionary of Occupational Titles, fourth edition revised, United States Employment Service. https://www.dol.gov/agencies/oalj/PUBLIC/DOT/REFERENCES/DOTFORW
4. United States Bureau of Labor Statistics. Classifying jobs: From the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) to the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC). https://www.bls.gov/ors/factsheet/classifying-jobs.htm