Category: Data Analytics
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21-09-2026
The last post identified potential transition pathways for truck drivers based on how closely other occupations matched them on skills, abilities and knowledge. This post follows the same basic approach across a wider range of occupations and asks whether two proxies could stand in for the ratings where no O*NET exists: a small language model comparing the meaning of job descriptions and the distance between two jobs' US Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) codes.
This post estimates potential labor market transition pathways based on the similarity of skills, abilities and knowledge required by occupations. The approach broadly follows Bratanova et al. (2026). Like their research, the considered transition pathways are for workers currently employed as truck drivers. Unlike their approach, we've used a more recent version of the O*NET database and a different SOC-to-ANZSCO crosswalk. Although the point wasn't to precisely replicate their results, our approach largely did, with differences in similarity scores likely stemming from our different mapping of the SOC to the ANZSCO rather than from the method itself.