The International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO–08) is maintained by the International Labour Organisation (ILO). ISCO-08 is increasingly being adopted worldwide. ISCO-08 defines a job as a bundle of tasks and duties performed by one person. Homogeneity of tasks define an occupation. ISCO’s manual includes task lists for all occupational titles, apart from 3 titles in the group ‘Armed forces’ and five so-called ‘not-elsewhere-classified’ titles (ILO, 2012). Hence, the ILO publication provides lists of task sets for 427 occupational titles at 4-digit level, varying between 2 and 14 tasks per title. In total 3,264 tasks are available, which is on average 7.6 tasks per occupational title. Almost all tasks are occupation-specific, and only a limited number of tasks are similar across more than one occupation.

The ISCO-08 lists of tasks per 4-digit occupation offer a great opportunity to investigate the homogeneity of tasks within an occupation across survey respondents, either in one country or in multiple countries. This assumes that each individual provides answers to survey questions concerning the tasks in his/her occupation. For two reasons a web survey seems to be the most suitable way to collect data on task implementation. First, in web surveys the respondents read the tasks, whereas in a face-to-face survey mode the interviewer reads the tasks out loud. It can be assumed that the reading of the tasks eases respondent’s comprehension of the tasks compared to listening, specifically because the tasks will be familiar to respondents as they relate to his/her occupation. Second, the survey software needs to be able to facilitate that the task list of respondent’s occupation is shown, and this needs to be selected from the pool of more than 3,000 tasks, which is more easy in the software for web surveys. A tight fieldwork budget and other priorities might hamper the inclusion of rather difficult and complex items in a questionnaire. Large sample sizes are needed in order to collect data for a sufficient number of occupations, taken into account that any labour force is very skewed distributed over the occupational units. Against this background, it is not surprising that task data are rarely available. However, the ISCO-08 task lists and the advances in web survey technology have opened new possibilities.

The source list of the tasks is in English. The list is translated in 13 languages, namely Bosnian, Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, Estonian, French, German, Indonesian, Norwegian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish.

Relevant materials:

The Excel file‘Task database’ gives an overview of the tasks.