Federal contractors that prepare affirmative action plans (AAPs) for women and minorities typically use U.S. Census data to calculate the theoretical “availability” against which they compare their incumbent populations for the purpose of setting female and/or minority placement rate goals. To accomplish this, the company’s job codes/titles must be mapped to one of just about 500 Occupational Classification Codes (OCCs) used by the U.S. Census Bureau.
The reliability of your availability estimates thus will correspond directly with how accurately your OCC assignments reflect the skills the company looks for when filling those positions. That said, the active OCCs and the descriptions available for those codes are not overly robust.
Accordingly, employers often seek advice regarding available resources to help them assign the “right” OCCs to their job codes/titles. While achieving this goal across the board may prove to be difficult, there are several resources and strategies that we have found to be useful in accomplishing this task.
Members of the Center for Workplace Compliance (CWC) can read more here.