NOC

The National Occupational Classification (NOC) is Canada’s national system for describing occupations.

National Occupational Classification

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About NOC

The National Occupational Classification (NOC) is the national reference on occupations in Canada. It provides a systematic classification structure that categorizes the entire range of occupational activity in Canada for collecting, analyzing, and disseminating occupational data for labour market information and employment-related program administration. Occupational information is of critical importance for the provision of labour market and career intelligence, skills development, occupational forecasting, labour supply and demand analysis, employment equity, and numerous other programs and services.

Step 1 - Exploring the NOC

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Delve into the basic structure of the NOC. The following details have been curated from the Government of Canada NOC website and added to our management system. Here is your free access to:

  • Introduction – Exploring the NOC
  • Applications
  • Broad occupational category
  • Skill Level
  • Test your knowledge (Quiz)
Step 2 - Structure of the NOC

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Expand your knowledge of the NOC structure. The following details have been curated from the Government of Canada NOC website and added to our management system. Here is your free access.

  • Structure of the National Occupational Classification
  • Major groups
  • Minor groups and unit groups
  • Test you knowledge (Quiz)
Step 3 - Occupational descriptions

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Understand the components of a NOC unit group. The following details have been curated from the Government of Canada NOC website and added to our management system. Here is your free access.

  • Occupational descriptions
  • Index of titles 
  • Test your Knowledge (Quiz)

NOC Hierarchy and structure

Click on the following image to access Government of Canada’s NOC structure.

The National Occupational Classification (NOC) 2016, is based on the NOC 2011 four-tiered hierarchical structure. The first level contains 10 broad occupational categories, the second level is made of 40 major groups, the third level consists of 140 minor groups and the last level comprises 500 unit groups.

The structure presented below allows you to drilldown from one of the broad occupational categories to its associated unit groups.

Source: Government of Canada.

Frequently asked questions

The following FAQs have been curated from the Government of Canada, NOC website for your convenience. WHC does not represent the details listed here as our own and for validation, verification or additional information, please visit https://noc.esdc.gc.ca/

About the National Occupational Classification

The National Occupational Classification (NOC) is a system for describing the occupations of Canadians. It gives statisticians, labour market analysts, career counsellors, employers, and individual job seekers a standardized way of describing and understanding the nature of work. Each group uses the NOC for various reasons:

  • Economists and statisticians, to guide the collection and compilation of data.
  • Labour market researchers, to understand the underpinnings of the statistics they use.
  • Government analysts, to guide policy decisions, to develop systems for training, for recruiting and job matching, to allocate spending for labour market programs, and for immigration selection procedures.
  • Educational counsellors and students, for career planning and exploration purposes.
  • Job seekers, employment counsellors, and employers, to make effective use of labour market information services.

A National Occupational Classification tutorial is available online for individuals who wish to develop an understanding of the classification system. This tutorial is self-directed and allows individuals to study specific parts of the NOC.

You can access the Government of Canada tutorial on this page. This has also been curated and set-up in our management system for your ability to track progress. 

About the National Occupational Classification’s unit group

If you are unsure of which National Occupational Classification (NOC) code is associated with your job, you can first try to search by job title.

To conduct a search by job title, go to the NOC home page; select the “Search by job title” tab in the search box and type in your job title. The results will return a list of NOC unit groups associated with the job title you have entered. If there are no results, please try again using other related job titles.

Once you have one or more NOC code(s) in your search results, you can click on any of them to look at its occupational description. Review the main duties and employment requirements within the occupational description to determine if these correspond to those associated with your occupation. Other information found in the occupational description, such as examples of job titles, additional information, and exclusions may also help. If the occupational description does not correspond to your job, consult a different one.

If you cannot find the NOC unit group associated with your occupation using the title job search, you access the NOC matrix via the Hierarchy and structure section to narrow down your research.

To do so, you will need to know which sector of activity your occupation is associated to (health, natural sciences, trades, or transportation for instance). That will allow you to limit your search to NOC unit groups found under one “broad occupational category”, which is represented by the first digit of the NOC code and displayed as rows in the NOC matrix. Then, further reduce the scope of your search based on the education level usually required to be employed in your job. Do people usually require a university degree, apprenticeship training, or on-the-job training? The level of education generally required (or skill level) corresponds to the second digit of the NOC code and is represented by a letter in the columns in the NOC matrix. Please note that this may differ from your personal education level.

Once you have identified both the broad occupational category and the skill level associated with your job, you will be able to identify a short list of relevant NOC minor groups (represented by the first three digits of the NOC code).

Keeping those minor group in mind, go to the Hierarchy and structure section and drilldown the structure to list all NOC unit groups found under the relevant NOC minor groups. You can then access to the occupational description of each unit groups to find where your occupation has been classified.

The National Occupational Classification (NOC) contains about 30,000 job titles in each of Canada’s official languages. While the listing in the Index is not meant to be exhaustive, it does provide extensive coverage of commonly used and understood titles in the economy and of more specific titles found in many occupational areas.

The list is updated on an ongoing basis to add emerging job titles and remove obsolete ones. Still, many job titles used everyday in the labour market are not included in the list of job titles found in the NOC. Here are a few reasons why:

  • The job title is very specific and not used often enough to be added to the list. Instead, a more generic job title, which encompasses these very specific job titles, is used.

    For instance, in unit group 4011 – University professors and lecturers, there are currently 117 different job titles. Yet, many existing job titles are not included because they are too specific and they can be linked to a more generic one. This is the case for the job title “biology professor – university” which is used in the NOC to capture all job titles associated with distinct biology teachers such as all microbiology teachers and their subspecialties (molecular virology, molecular biology, immunology, genetics, etc.).

  • The job title is fairly recent and more analysis is required before including it in the list of job titles.

One of the objectives of the National Occupational Classification (NOC) is to provide a system to describe and organize occupations in Canada for data collection and data analysis purposes. As such, when the NOC was first developed and during each revision since then, several factors where taken into account to define each unit group found within the NOC. A given unit group may represent one or more occupations according to the following criteria:

  • Broad occupational category;
  • Skill level;
  • Main duties;
  • Employment requirements and;
  • Education level in the occupation(s) considered.

Basically, occupations in the same broad occupational category and skill level and that have very similar duties and employment requirements will tend to be combined together. This is notably the case for all university professors and lecturers (associated with NOC code 4011) and all specialist physicians (associated with NOC code 3111).

In some instances however, even after combining several occupations together, the number of workers in the unit group is still too low. As a result, occupations found under the same broad occupational category and skill level but with different duties and/or different employment requirements, such as air pilots, flight engineers, and flying instructors (associated with NOC code 2271) can be combined together into one unit group.

About concepts associated with the National Occupational Classification

An occupation is defined as a set of jobs that are sufficiently similar in work performed. A job corresponds to all the tasks carried out by a particular worker to complete his or her duties. For instance, dentist is an occupation which encompasses different job titles which carry out very similar tasks such as dental surgeon, dentist, general practice dentist, and orthodontist.

A unit group, as defined in the National Occupational Classification, can represent a given occupation (such as dentist — NOC code 3113) or a set of different occupations falling in the same broad occupational category and skill level and with very similar duties and employment requirements. For instance, unit group 2148 – Other professional engineers, n.e.c. regroups several occupations such as agricultural engineer, marine engineer, and textile engineer under the same unit group.

Finally, in very few cases, a NOC unit group can combine occupations presenting somewhat different duties and/or employment requirements, such as for unit group 2271 – Air pilots, flight engineers and flying instructors.

The National Occupational Classification (NOC) classifies occupations using two main criteria: broad occupational category and skill level.

The first digit of the NOC code identifies the broad occupational category of an occupation. This corresponds to the type of work performed, or the educational area of study required. For example, the NOC code of occupations associated with the health sector begin with a three (3).

Skill levels are used to represent the kind and/or amount of training or education required for entering an occupation and are represented by letters A to D in the NOC matrix. A unit group’s skill level is usually associated with the second digit of its NOC code.

The exception is management occupations, for which the first digit of the code represents the type of work (management) and the second digit represents the sector of employment.

For instance, for NOC unit group 0601 – Corporate sales managers, the first digit (0) represents the management broad occupational category while the second digit (6) represents the sales and service sector.

Employment requirements represent prerequisites generally requested by employers and/or professional associations to enter a given occupation. Several types of requirements are listed:

  • type and level of education including specific subject matter if relevant, starting with the lowest possible requirement for entry into the occupation;
  • specific training required, including apprenticeship, on-the-job, or internal training;
  • experience in a related occupation, especially for supervisory or managerial occupations;
  • licences, certificates or affiliations; and/or
  • other requirements not dependent on formal education, such as athletic abilities, artistic talent, or presentation of a portfolio.

While some occupations have very specific employment requirements, others have a wide range of acceptable requirements. The following terminology is used to indicate the level of the requirement:

  • “Is required” indicates a definite requirement.
  • “Is usually required” means that the qualification is generally expressed as required by a majority of employers, but is not always mandatory.
  • “May be required” describes requirements that some employers may impose, but are not universal.

Qualities related to personal suitability that may have an impact on employability are not described in the classification. These factors are subjective and determined by employers and are assessed during the hiring process.

The main duties section describes the most significant duties of the occupations in the group. They do not intend to be comprehensive of all the tasks performed in the occupation. They represent key duties that are related to the occupation(s) associated with the unit group and can be listed using:

  • a series of statements that can be applied to all occupations in the group;
  • two or more sub-sets of occupations with statements that apply to each sub-set or component; and/or
  • a series of brief statements that are linked to specific occupations, that, while similar enough to be in the same group, can be described separately.
  • statements in italics, at the end of the section, which identify a specialization that may exist within the occupation.
About updates to the National Occupational Classification

Every now and then, the Employment and Social Development Canada (ESDC), in partnership with Statistics Canada, launches an online consultation process to gather comments on the structure, composition, and content of the National Occupational Classification.

Changes to the content of the NOC (addition of job titles, main duties for instance) take place on an annual basis. Changes which may affect the structure of the NOC take place every ten years with the next one planned for 2021. You can consult the information associated with the consultation process here to learn more.

The 2016 version of the National Occupational Classification (NOC) updated the content of the occupational descriptions and added over 200 job titles while maintaining the structure of the 2011 edition. No major groups, minor groups, or unit groups have been added, deleted, or combined, though some groups have modified labels and/or updated content. Many new job titles have been added to NOC 2016, which arise as the division of labour in Canadian society evolves, creating new jobs and new specializations and as technological change brings with it new terminology. To clarify the boundaries between occupations, a few titles have been re-assigned to (a) different unit group(s) in the 2016 version of the NOC. The impact of these on the comparability of data between 2011 and 2016 are negligible.

More details about the 2016 version of the NOC is available in the NOC Versions section of the website.

The National Occupational Classification (NOC) is updated on a regular basis. Information regarding the changes associated with the current and previous versions of the NOC as well as concordance tables between those different versions can be found in the NOC Versions section of the website.

If you wish to access the NOC structure or matrix of a previous version of the NOC, you can access it here. Once on this page, you can select the relevant NOC version.

You can also search for job titles found in a previous version of the NOC by selecting the NOC version prior to conducting your search on the NOC home page

About updates to the National Occupational Classification

Individuals or organizations interested in integrating National Occupational Classification (NOC) information directly into their Internet-enabled applications can ask for the creation of a NOC Web Service account. Via this service, they will be able to download the NOC program’s codes directly into their applications.

The NOC Web Service enables individuals and organizations to:

  • Improve timely access to relevant occupational and skill information;
  • Ensure accuracy and consistency of information in their products and services;
  • Seamlessly integrate occupational information into websites under their own look and feel; and
  • Save money on costs related to application development, database uploading, and maintenance.

To request a NOC Web Service account, please contact us and enter: “Creation of a web service account” in the subject line.

Job Bank’s website provides a lot of information to help job seekers find a job related to their occupation as identified in the National Occupational Classification. Job seekers can notably:

  • Browse through thousands of job postings using the Job Bank website or mobile application and;
  • Get job alerts as new jobs matching their interests are posted.

You can access Job Bank’s website here.

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