Job vs. Occupation
A job is a group of workers in a specific establishment who have the same position. A occupation is a profession or trade that exists across establishments.
Example: “Waiters at Smith’s Restaurant” is a job. “Waiters” is an occupation.
This distinction matters because requirements vary at the job level even within the same occupation. The same occupation performed at different establishments may have meaningfully different physical demands, cognitive requirements, or environmental conditions.
National-level occupational data necessarily aggregates across these local variations. This creates a representation gap: the “occupation” as measured is an abstraction, a statistical composite of many particular jobs, each with its own context-dependent requirements.