Operationalizing Tacit Work Knowledge

The BLS Occupational Requirements Survey represents a systematic attempt to make tacit knowledge about work explicit and measurable at national scale.

What a job “requires” is largely tacit, embodied in practice, understood by practitioners, but not formally documented. The ORS converts this into structured data through a defined methodology: field economists interview establishment representatives, apply standardized frameworks (strength levels, SVP scales), and produce percentage-of-workers estimates.

The approach reveals inherent tensions in tacit-to-explicit conversion:

• Requirements are context-dependent, but measurement requires standardization
• Physical demands are continuous, but classification requires discrete categories
• Individual jobs vary, but policy decisions need aggregate estimates

The ORS navigates these by measuring distributions rather than single values, what percentage of workers in an occupation require a given strength level, preserving some variation information even as it abstracts from particular jobs.

Related: 06-molecule—tacit-vs-explicit-knowledge, 06-atom—job-vs-occupation-distinction