Revisiting the Work Styles Domain of the O*NET Content Model

This paper describes the effort to update the Work Styles portion of the O*NET Content Model. Project steps included:

• reviewing the relevant academic literature to identify personality dimensions appearing in published, contemporary taxonomies of personality;
• using natural language processing (NLP) techniques to facilitate consolidation and clustering of personality dimensions from those taxonomies;
• comparing the clusters of personality dimensions to current Work Styles and assessing areas of overlap and uniqueness;
• developing a draft set of revised Work Styles for further evaluation; and
• conducting a linkage exercise with personality and job analysis subject matter experts (SMEs) to evaluate whether the draft revised Work Styles were related to the world of work and to assist with final recommendations.

A new Work Styles structure was developed including 21 lower-order dimensions organized into 7 higher-order dimensions (see: Work Style Names and Descriptions for O*NET Content Model Reference). In addition, cross-domain linkages were developed (see: Work Style-Work Activity Linkage Research Dataset and Work Style-Work Context Linkage Research Dataset).