Purpose of the Career Handbook

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Finding understandable information about the entire world of work and how it is organized can be difficult. The purpose of the Career Handbook is to provide useful, reliable and accessible information about occupations to counsellors and their clients.

The Career Handbook has been developed by occupational researchers, analysts and trained raters. The ratings assigned to each group are global and describe the occupation with respect to skills and other variables to provide important indicators for career exploration. The Handbook will help counsellors and their clients investigate occupations and make informed career decisions.

The Career Handbook is intended for career counselling, development and exploration purposes. HRSDC neither condones nor recommends the use of this information for other purposes. The profiles presented here are not appropriate for other uses such as screening applicants for particular positions or determining insurance benefits. The data do not replace the use of criterion-referenced testing to establish performance requirements for work as it occurs in the labour market. There are three major reasons for this limitation:

• The conceptual foundation of the NOC and the Handbook is occupations, not jobs. An occupation is a collection of similar jobs that share some or all of a set of Main Duties. The tasks of specific jobs vary from establishment to establishment.
• The rated information in the Handbook is not based on experimental data collected from representative samples of the employed labour force for the occupations of the NOC.
• Development of the NOC and the Handbook did not include the collection of data on specific working conditions for jobs contained within occupational groups of the NOC.

The Career Handbook was released in 2003.

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