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Handbook of Methods Occupational Requirements Survey Presentation

Occupational Requirements Survey: Presentation

Occupational Requirement Survey (ORS) news releases, data, and other information can be found at www.bls.gov/ors. The primary purpose of collecting ORS data is to provide a comprehensive dataset on the physical demands; environmental conditions; education, training, and experience; and cognitive and mental requirements for jobs in the U.S. economy by detailed occupations. Users may include

• Jobseekers
• Researchers
• Insurance companies
• Advocacy organizations
• Data users within nonprofits
• Employment agencies
• State and federal agencies
• Disability community
• Vocational experts
• Human resource professionals
• Medical professionals
• Actuaries

ORS data are used for a variety of purposes:

• Assisting the Social Security Administration in its disability adjudication process
• Using data for new opportunities in research, such as in academia or government
• Tracking the nature of work
• Benchmarking job descriptions or developing targeted recruiting plans
• Helping insurance companies assess risk management
• Assisting temporary-help firms to properly match an employee to job openings

Accessing data

The complete set of 2018 ORS data can be found at https://www.bls.gov/ors/data.htm. On-screen query tools and flat files are available for data users. Flat files can be downloaded at https://download.bls.gov/pub/time.series/or/, which also includes a description of these files and the structure of ORS series. In addition, occupational profiles providing an overview of job requirements for a specific occupation are available.

Although the occupational requirements data may have many uses, it is important to remember the estimate limitations. The data are subject to sampling error, which may cause deviations from the results that would be obtained if the actual requirements for jobs in all establishments could be used. Nonsampling error is present in surveys as well. See the Calculation section for more information. Also, the current imputation process used by ORS remains under development and may be refined in the future. To assist users in ascertaining the reliability of the ORS estimates, standard errors are available with the estimates released through the public data query tools and complete ORS dataset.

Corrections policy

The estimates published in 2018 reflect data collected over a 3-year period, consisting of three separately selected samples. The published data for the third year are final for this set of published information. In the event that BLS identifies estimation, collection, or processing errors which result in statistically significant different estimates, BLS will identify the incorrect estimates and provide a notice to users  on the BLS errata page regarding whether the error will be suppressed or corrected.