How World Career Atlas maps occupations across countries
Why local job titles are preserved, how O*NET is used as a baseline, and why some roles stay unmapped until review.
Why mapping is needed
Countries do not describe work in one shared language. A Norwegian, Swedish, German or American occupation table can use different codes, local titles and levels of detail for work that is broadly similar. If those tables are imported without mapping, salary and skill comparisons become misleading because users cannot tell whether two rows describe the same kind of work.
World Career Atlas uses O*NET as the main baseline for detailed occupations because it gives a structured set of occupations, skills, work activities and tasks. Local titles from national datasets are still stored and shown because they matter for users searching in their own country.
When a match is not forced
Some local titles do not have a responsible one-to-one match. In those cases the local title can remain visible as natural language or as a broad occupation group until a better mapping is reviewed. This is safer than forcing a weak match that would attach the wrong skills, tasks or salary comparison.
Reviewed user suggestions can improve mappings over time. A user can suggest that a local title is related to an existing mapped occupation, but that suggestion should be checked before it changes public data.