Data Services Knowledge Base

Starting in 2000 and continuing with the American Community Survey (ACS), the Census Bureau is releasing two occupation variables. The items are:

    OCCCEN  Occupation (census code)
    OCCSOC  Occupation (Standard Occupational Classification code)

The two codes correspond perfectly with each other. Every code in OCCCEN is represented by one and only one code in OCCSOC. And, every code in OCCSOC is represented by one and only one code in OCCCEN.

However, the perfect correspondence is due to some collapsing of OCCSOC codes on the part of the Census Bureau. For instance, the OCCCEN code for computer scientists and system analysts is 100. This maps to the following SOC codes:

     15-1011    Computer and information scientists, research
     15-1051    Computer system analysts
     15-1099    Computer specialists, all other

For the time being, the Census Bureau has collapsed the above three OCCSOC codes to 15-10XX.

Any time there is an XX in OCCSOC, this means the Census Bureau collapsed some of the detail in OCCSOC to maintain correspondence with OCCCEN.

Users need to become familiar with OCCSOC. Future products will be released with this item. The following is the implementation schedule for using OCCSOC: SOC Implementation Schedule