Method for developing occupation profiles for the quantum industry

Efforts to develop courses and programs that prepare students for emerging technologies, such as quantum computing, require an understanding of occupations in the aligned emerging industries. For established occupations, including many STEM occupations, the O*NET database, which is sponsored by the U.S Department of Labor, has detailed occupation profiles. We will introduce the O*NET framework, which includes knowledge, skills, abilities, activities, and tasks that are organized into worker-oriented and job-oriented features. Within this framework, occupation-specific tasks and technology skills have been particularly fruitful for characterizing jobs in the quantum industry in ways we hope are useful to students and educators. We will share our method for developing career profiles and compare it to O*NET and other efforts to characterize occupations in emerging STEM fields (e.g., cybersecurity, AI). Finally, we reflect on how occupations in the quantum industry overlap with established categories in the US Department of Labor Standard Occupational Categorization system, which is used for quantifying the availability of jobs in different occupations.