Applied ML Systems · Capstone brief
DS-17 · What a job posting actually asks for
Using occupational skill data, map how skill requirements differ across occupations in one Virginia industry — and identify which skills are shared across occupations that people think of as unrelated.
The question
Using occupational skill data, map how skill requirements differ across occupations in one Virginia industry — and identify which skills are shared across occupations that people think of as unrelated.
Data
O*NET database (https://www.onetcenter.org/database.html). BLS Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for Virginia (https://www.bls.gov/oes/tables.htm).
Expected failure modes
O*NET importance ratings are survey-derived and compress into a narrow band, so raw distances between occupations are dominated by scale rather than content. Occupation codes change across releases. Correlating skills with wages invites immediate causal overreach.
Done looks like
A clustering or similarity analysis over occupations with the standardization choice defended, at least one non-obvious adjacency identified and sanity-checked, and wage discussion kept explicitly descriptive.
Five C's
CT: recognizing scale effects in similarity. CR: finding a genuinely surprising adjacency. CO: peer sanity-check of clusters against lived knowledge. CM: a career-counseling-usable summary. CZ: this maps onto real students' futures — overclaiming has a cost.
Mentor role
A workforce-development analyst, HR professional, career counselor, or economist reviews the similarity method at Checkpoint 1 and the adjacencies at Checkpoint 2. School-supervised.
Rubric calibration
R1: one industry, one similarity question. R2: code vintages aligned. R3: a naive similarity baseline. R4: clusters validated against outside knowledge. R5: usable by a counselor. R6: no causal wage claims.
Two ways this goes wrong
(a) Unstandardized ratings produce clusters that reflect how generous each survey panel was. (b) The student reports that a skill "raises wages" from a cross-sectional correlation.
Source moved or something unclear? Send feedback on this brief. Mentors are advisory; the school supervises. These briefs do not produce verified computer-science credit.