Rubenerd

I was helping someone with metadata on her website, when we realised that you can use Schema metadata to define the occupation of a Person with, surprising though it may seem, hasOccupation. The Occupation type includes the following attribute:

occupationalCategory

A category describing the job, preferably using a term from a taxonomy such as BLS O∗NET-SOC, ISCO-08 or similar, with the property repeated for each applicable value.

ISCO is the International Standard Classification of Occupations, as published by the International Labour Organization. I wonder if their title was a compromise between the correct spelling of Labour, and the incorrect spelling of Organization?

ISCO-08 is the most recent iteration of the Index of Occupational Titles. Naturally I downloaded the PDF, like a gentleman, to see if and where they classify Technical Writers. On page 178:

2641 Authors and Related Writers

Authors and related writers plan, research and write books, scripts, storyboards, plays, essays, speeches, manuals, specifications and other non-journalistic articles (excluding material for newspapers, magazines and other periodicals) for publication or presentation.

Among the tasks listed:

b) conducting research to establish factual content and to obtain other necessary information;

d) analysing material, such as specifications, notes and drawings, and creating manuals, instructions for use, user guides and other documents to explain clearly and concisely the installation, operation and maintenance of software, electronic, mechanical and other equipment;

I’m in far more creative company than I deserve here:

Author, Book editor, Essayist, Indexer, Interactive media writer, Novelist, Playwright, Poet, Script writer, Speech writer, Technical communicator, Technical writer, Writer

I’m also a “systems designer (IT)” in their parlance, which sits under 2511 Systems Analysts on page 144. There are no poets in that classification, unfortunately.