Work, Jobs, and Occupations A Critical Review of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (1980) / Chapter Skim
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G USING COMPUTERS TO MATCH WORKERS AND JOBS: A PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. EMPLOYMENT SERVICE'S AUTOMATED MATCHING SYSTEM
G USING COMPUTERS TO MATCH WORKERS AND JOBS: A PRELIMINARY ASSESSMENT OF THE U.S. EMPLOYMENT SERVICE'S AUTOMATED MATCHING SYSTEM
Pages 390-410
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From page 390... ...
TURNER The task of matching workers and employment opportunities requires extensive record-keeping. Files of job openings must be continually updated; jobs that have been filled must be removed from the files and new listings must be added.
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From page 391... ...
, the number of individual comparisons between job orders and worker descriptions required for a complete file search would be reduced from approximately 11 million to 37,000. If the workers and job openings were spread over a larger number of occupational titles, the number of comparisons required decreases, assuming a uniform distribution of workers and jobs across occupations.
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From page 392... ...
indicate that DOT applicant and job order files are not frequently searched for matches of applicants with new job orders. Only one third of all referrals resulted from manual file searches done subsequent to an applicant's initial appearance in the Employment Service office.
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From page 393... ...
Automated matching systems based on aspects of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles were developed in New York and Utah. The experimental system developed by New York matched jobs and workers using DOT codes.
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From page 394... ...
, was developed using the language of job analysis to describe the characteristics of particular jobs and the experience of individual workers. This system explicitly rejected the concept of "occupation" as the bridge for matching workers and jobs.
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From page 395... ...
After a series of field studies of the performance of state Employment Service offices using the various systems, the Division of Automated Matching of the Employment Service concluded that the second-generation automated systems (lAV and DECAL) have a demonstrated superiority to manual methods of job-worker matching.
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From page 396... ...
As Table G- 1 shows, approximately .4 of all workers are concentrated in 4 of the 36 keyword occupational units: clerical, service, general labor, and business administration. The major reference document for the keyword system is the Handbook of Occupational Keywords (U.S.
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From page 397... ...
technical/electrical equipment fabricating (26) metal products fabricating (27)
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From page 398... ...
Assignment of keyword occupational units to the detailed census codes was done for us by staff of the U.S. Employment Service's Division of Automated Matching Systems.
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From page 399... ...
Complementary keywords are specific to an occupational unit and its associated primary terms; thus selection of a primary term, e.g., biological work, constrains the domain of complementary terms that will be used to describe the work. To use the keyword system to code a job or worker, an Employment Service interviewer must do the following: 1.
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From page 400... ...
In the matching strategy used by the keyword system, the primary terms, which describe major work areas such as biological work, have a logical precedence in matching over the complementary terms. Skill and knowledge requirements in job orders may be satisfied by either the worker's formal education or his or her work experience.
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From page 401... ...
We also wish to note, however, that while the evidence is not convincing in the affirmative, neither is it convincingly negative. It is simply not known whether keyword matching produces more and better matches of workers and job openings than manual methods.
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From page 402... ...
more efficient bookkeepers than humans, the automation of local Employment Service offices makes possible new methods of matching workers and jobs that would be completely infeasible otherwise. Many of these opportunities arise because complete information on the work histories, referrals, and placements of workers can be used to guide local offices in deciding which workers make "good" referrals for particular job openings.
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From page 403... ...
At present, the full histories of workers enrolled at Employment Service offices are obtained by interviewers and coded onto the applicants' records. Indeed, annual national samples of several million of these worker histories are routinely collected by the Employment Service's Automated Reporting System (ESARS)
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From page 404... ...
An adaptive computerized matching system would note that there were a number of computer-related occupations into which former aerospace engineers had transferred in that labor market. Thus even though most occupational classifications would not consider the occupations very similar, the labor market information routinely gathered by the local Employment Service might reveal that there was enough transferability of skill and knowledge so that some displaced aerospace engineers could find jobs in new occupations in the computer industry and thus were reasonable matches.
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From page 405... ...
The keyword approach to this problem is simple to state.7 In the keyword system, jobs and workers are assigned to one of 36 major occupational units; a primary term from that unit describes the major aspect of the work. As noted above, these primary terms consist almost exclusively of occupational titles that have been grammatically transformed, e.g., anthropology work (anthropologist)
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From page 406... ...
Thus if the interviewer specifies a special search strategy called "explosion," "rural sociologist" will be considered for job openings coded simply as "sociologist." Because the similarity of primary terms and hence occupations is largely undefined in the keyword system, there is no way to build linkages across work areas. Instead, "complementary" terms describing less central characteristics of occupations are used to accomplish such matching.
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From page 407... ...
How the keyword system groups together occupations is important because each of the 36 occupational units uses different sets of complementary terms. Matches across different occupational units are less likely than those within the same unit because there is a smaller number of complementary terms in common between units.
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From page 408... ...
Comparatively speaking, the keyword occupational units do not adequately group together occupations between which there is a substantial movement of workers. The shortcomings of the occupational unit arrangement are another serious conceptual problem of the keyword system.
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From page 409... ...
Furthermore, the possibility of implementing major changes in the keyword matching system is impeded by the fact that any change would have to be programmed four times~nce in IBM assembly language and once in the assembly languages of Univac, Burroughs, and Honeywell.~4 The use of both nonstandard hardware and machine-dependent computer languages in the design of the automated matching system is a major problem of the current system. It has the important practical consequence of inhibiting attempts to improve the system through redesign.
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From page 410... ...
improvement of keyword matching strategies, and (4) elimination of operational inefficiencies (e.g., use of ordinary English keywords rather than numerical codes)
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