The “All Other” Escape Valve
Robust classification systems include catch-all categories for entities that don’t fit neatly into defined buckets.
The SOC implements this with “All Other” occupations, appearing as the last occupation in a group with a code ending in 9. These aren’t failures of the system; they’re designed accommodations for the irreducible messiness of reality.
The pattern: every taxonomy needs somewhere for edge cases to live. Without escape valves, systems force false precision, coding things into categories where they don’t belong, degrading data quality and eroding trust in the classification.
Related: 02-molecule—hierarchical-aggregation-levels, 02-atom—task-based-classification