National Sweep — Occupational drift analysis

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Postings
collected

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Employers
in dataset

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Metro areas
covered

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Occupations
analyzed

Initial national survey April 2026 — June 2026

Sources O*NET 30.2 · BLS Employment Projections · U.S. job postings

Occupational drift measures how far employer practice has moved from the federal standard — duties that have emerged beyond it, and canonical tasks that have disappeared from it. Together, these signals show how work is reorganizing.

Emerging

Duties appearing beyond the standard

Employers are requiring work that the federal O*NET definition doesn’t describe. Each signal was independently confirmed by multiple employers across multiple metro areas.

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Occupations
with emerging duties

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Independent duty
clusters detected

Explore emerging duties →

Disappearing

Canonical tasks absent from postings

These O*NET task statements are consistently missing from employer postings across multiple U.S. metro areas. The standard describes work that employers have stopped asking for.

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Occupations with
disappearing tasks

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Canonical tasks
disappearing

Explore disappearing tasks →

View all occupations →

How the sweep works. Our agents collect recent job postings across U.S. metro areas, parse every sentence, and classify each as a duty, qualification, or boilerplate. Duty sentences are embedded using JobBERT and semantically compared against all canonical O*NET task statements. Sentences that don’t match any federal task are candidates for emerging duties and proceed through a five-gate validation pipeline. Canonical tasks that aren’t matched by any duty sentence are recorded as absent. Both signals are aggregated nationally and gated by multi-metro confirmation before being reported. This is semantic measurement against a stable ontology baseline — with sentence-level traceability.

Sources: O*NET® 30.2 Database (federal task standards) · BLS Employment Projections · NCES CIP-SOC Crosswalk · semanticinsight.tech agent pipeline.