How to Help Dislocated Workers Find Similar Jobs

This tutorial addresses how to research jobs with similar knowledge, skill, and ability sets. Ideally, a dislocated worker can more quickly re-enter the workforce in a similar career with minimal re-training and downtime. Emsi Burning Glass displays compatible occupations by comparing the competency sets from O*NET’s database. Occupations with significant overlap in these competencies are ranked as highly compatible. In this example we’ll find jobs similar to Web Developers.

1. Click Occupations
2. Click Compatible O*NET Occupations
3. Under “Select an O*NET Occupation” enter the job you’d like to see similar jobs for (we’ll look at Web Developers here)
4. Under “Select a Region” enter the city or other region you’d like to see jobs data for (we’ll use the United States)
5. Observe the “Median Hourly Earnings,” $33.38 in this case.
6. Scroll down to “Top Compatible Occupations.”

This list is ranked by Emsi Burning Glass’s compatibility index, found in the far right column. The scale is 1-100, and really anything above 95 we’d consider a strong match. This table brings the top 10 most compatible occupations together with relevant wage and job opportunity info. The hope is that for someone who lost their job as a machinist and can’t find work in that particular field, this list provides some jumping off points for other careers they may already be well-suited for. The job growth and wage figures help guide that decision, so a worker can transition into a field with good job opportunities AND good pay relative to the $28.87 they were making.

At this point you could be done. You’ve found 10 jobs that are similar to what that worker did in the past, and hopefully a handful of them pay as well or better and have good job prospects. If you’d like to dig further into the similarities and differences between two jobs, read on:

In our example here, Web Administrator looks like a good prospect for our displaced Web Developer. The pay is better ($43.40/hr), it’s a growing occupation, and we estimate about 61,000 openings per year. To find out more about how the two jobs stack up, click the Compatibility Index Number. Now we can see how training levels compare between the two, how wages trend over time spent in each career, and where the specific knowledge, skill, and ability gaps exist for a web developer thinking about becoming a web administrator.