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Occupation Details API Guide

Occupation Details API allows you to retrieve detailed, structured information about a given occupation, whether sourced from Pearson’s Ontology.

It's a foundational API that serves as a lookup and reference tool across our ecosystem — enabling you to explore core occupation insights like skills, tasks, and hierarchical metadata.

Whether you're standardizing job architectures, conducting workforce transformation projects, or planning future capability needs, this API supports strategic analysis and decision-making with reliable occupation intelligence.

Who is this API for?

This API is most useful for strategy and transformation leaders who need structured, scalable occupation data to power their workforce programs. In particular:

  • People Strategist: Looking to structure job architecture and align roles to future-fit capabilities.

  • Learning Manager: Driving capability uplift and skill-based development by understanding what’s required of each role.

  • Tech Strategist: Exploring automation potential or building solutions tied to task-level role definitions.

Goals this API helps you achieve

This API is directly aligned with several key business objectives, including:

  • Analyze role-specific skills to uncover capability strengths and gaps.

  • Map data to Pearson’s ontology for consistent occupation alignment across programs.

  • Standardize roles and salaries using a consistent source of truth for occupational intelligence.

What’s included in the API?

The Occupation Details API provides access to three primary data groups:

Section Description
1. Metadata Title, ID, Ontology version, standard/custom status, parent-child lineage
2. Skills Breakdown of skills relevant to the occupation, grouped by type and level
3. Tasks Typical responsibilities and task descriptions associated with the role

These sections mirror the UI cards you’ll see on the API Showcase (Occupation Details page) and are accessible via endpoint requests.

API Inputs and Outputs

Here’s a simplified overview of what goes into and comes out of this API:

  • Input

    • occupation_id: This is the unique ID of the occupation you're retrieving data for. These IDs are consistent across the platform and map to our global ontology.

  • Output

    • A structured response that includes:

      • Metadata: The name of the occupation, its unique ID, whether it’s a Pearson-standard or custom occupation, and its parent-child relationship in the ontology.

      • Skills: Lists of skills grouped into categories (e.g., Foundational, Technical), each with its relevance level.

      • Tasks: Descriptive breakdowns of key responsibilities typically associated with the occupation.

This structure ensures that you can access both high-level summaries and deep-dive data to inform workforce decisions.

Real-world applications

Looking for inspiration on how this API is used in strategic contexts? Here are a few examples:

  • Align internal job titles to a consistent ontology during org design or transformation.

  • Build custom dashboards showing skill intensity across high-priority roles.

  • Model transitions between occupations by comparing their skills and tasks.

  • Enrich L&D pathways by understanding what capabilities are required per role.

  • Pre-process data for AI-driven job/role matching or talent analytics.

API Bundle

Foundational APIs – This means it’s already included for all paying API customers.

Important: This article complements our reference docs rather than replaces them (see complete spec here: docs.workforce.pearson.com).
You’ll find deeper context, integration tips, usage patterns and downstream considerations here.