Talent Map methodology
How We Classify Job Titles
Behind every candidate count in the Indigenous Talent Map is a deliberate classification decision. Here is how we map free-text job titles to OSCA codes, when we honestly stop at a broader level, and how our context-aware approach handles the long tail of titles that title-only classifiers get wrong.
The OSCA Hierarchy in One Paragraph
The Occupation Standard Classification for Australia (OSCA) is the ABS’s official framework for classifying every job into a 5-level hierarchy: Major Group (1 digit), Sub-Major (2), Minor (3), Unit Group (4), and Occupation (6). The Talent Map maps every employment record on a candidate’s profile to an OSCA code. How confident we are at each level varies by title.
A Four-Step Classification Chain
Every job title runs this gauntlet. Confident matches stop early; ambiguous ones get the full treatment.
Lookup Cache
If we have classified the same title in the same industry before, and we are confident the title's meaning is unambiguous, we reuse that result.
Official ABS Alternative Titles
The OSCA framework publishes alternative names for each occupation (for example "RN" for Registered Nurse). Direct matches take this path.
Title Pattern Matching
Exact and fuzzy title matches against the OSCA reference. Catches the long tail of standard titles.
Context-Aware AI
For ambiguous titles, we send the title plus the candidate's industry (ANZSIC division), employer description, job duties, education field, and other roles to a language model trained on the OSCA rules. This is what handles Site Manager, Field Technician, Specialist, and similar context-dependent titles.
When We Return a Partial OSCA Code
A correct partial code beats a confidently-wrong 6-digit code every time. If the evidence only supports the 4-digit Unit Group level, we stop there. The alternative, padding every result to 6 digits even when guessing, would silently degrade the quality of feasibility scores and gap analyses.
There is also a special case: when an OSCA Unit Group contains only one occupation, the 6-digit code is just the disambiguated form of the 4-digit code, and either is fine.
441312Unit Group 4413 only contains one occupation. The 6-digit code is just the disambiguated form of the 4-digit. No ambiguity to resolve.
27254-digit is a confident answer. 6-digit specialisation depends on context that may not be present in the record.
context requiredCould be Construction Site Supervisor, Quality Assurance Manager, Environmental Site Manager, or several others depending on industry and duties.
Two Kinds of Job Title
Context-Independent
Some occupations are regulated, licensed, or named so specifically that the title is the occupation regardless of employer.
Registered nurses, electricians, solicitors, paramedics, pharmacists. We cache these confidently.
Context-Dependent
Other titles are role-shaped words whose OSCA code genuinely depends on industry, duties, and education.
Manager, Officer, Coordinator, Specialist, Lead, Trainee, Engineer. We never serve these from a title-only cache. Every classification gets the full context-aware treatment.
Non-Occupational Roles
Board Member, Committee Member, Volunteer, Student Representative, and bare Consultant without a specialty word are not occupations in the OSCA sense. We exclude these from our occupation counts so they do not inflate or distort workforce planning numbers. They remain in the candidate’s history; they are simply not classified as paid work.
Looking for Indigenous Board Members or Governance Candidates?
Speak with your Shine People Solutions consultant directly. Board, committee, and other governance placements are handled through your consultant rather than via the Talent Map’s occupation search, because the right candidate is usually identified by lived experience, networks, and cultural standing rather than by job title alone.
Talk to a consultantHow We’re Different from the ABS API
The ABS publishes a free job-title classification API that maps titles to 6-digit OSCA codes. The Talent Map uses that API as one signal among several. The ABS API has no employer context. It cannot tell you whether a Field Technician works in mining or telecommunications, whether a Specialist has a nursing or accounting background, or whether a Site Manager is in construction or quality assurance.
Our pipeline considers the candidate’s industry, employer description, job duties, education field, and other roles they have held before assigning a code. For unambiguous occupations the ABS API is fine. For the long tail of generic titles, the context-aware approach materially improves accuracy. Where the evidence does not support a specific 6-digit code we honestly stop at the 4-digit unit or 3-digit minor group rather than guessing.
Recent Experience by Default
A workforce-planning headline like “1,247 Indigenous registered nurses available” means very different things if the count includes people who last worked as a nurse in 2003 versus people who held that role in the past five years. The Talent Map defaults the search to candidates with recent experience (last 5 years or currently in the role), so the figure you see is the one that’s realistic for upcoming work. Older bands — 5-10 years ago and 10+ years ago — stay one click away when the use case calls for them (former experts who might return to the field, cultural-leadership succession where decades of experience are an asset).
Every report headline carries both numbers side by side, e.g. “Matching Candidates: 4,694 (in last 5 years) · 7,097 across all history”. Customers see both the honest current-feasibility figure and the legacy all-history figure for comparison — neither view is hidden from them.
When a candidate’s matching role is older than 5 years, the card shows a coarse band (5-10 yrs ago or 10+ yrs ago) rather than a precise year. The exact year is held server-side for sorting (recent first) but is never sent to the browser. This is a deliberate de-identification choice: a precise year combined with state, occupation, and qualification could enable cross-reference against public records to reverse-engineer a candidate’s identity, which would defeat the anonymous-by-design model. The band preserves the staleness signal for decision-making without enabling re-identification.
Why This Matters for Workforce Planning
When you filter the Talent Map for Project Officer, you get candidates whose duties were actually those of a project officer in their industry. Not everyone who happened to have those words in their job title. That precision is what makes feasibility scores, network strength badges, IPP compliance reports, and RAP workforce gap analyses defensible to your board, your tender authority, and your stakeholders.
The classification methodology evolves over time. We re-evaluate ambiguous titles as language models improve and as the underlying ABS reference data is updated. If you ever see a candidate count or classification that looks wrong, your Shine consultant can help interpret the edge case.
See the Talent Map in Action
Explore how context-aware classification powers Australia’s only Indigenous workforce planning platform.