How can Jinn Career Encyclopedia help in a post covid-19 world

Most of us often do not use a career encyclopedia or anything resembling a job encyclopedia. Usually, we would need it either as a student or at the beginning of our professional life or prepare for a drastic career change. In all cases, doing this kind of research is always better carried out with friends already in the same career field you want to join or with a career counselor.

Considering how most job boards operate, it is always a minimum to know what job you are searching for. And because there is no prominent career encyclopedia available online, the vast majority turn to Google Search. From there, they visit different sites to find the information they need, with relative success.

The impact of covid-19 on employment in the world

According to the International Labour Organization, the covid-19 pandemic wiped out about 255 million jobs in the world in 2020. Once again, low-income countries paid the highest price. However, richer countries have not been spared by the crises, with the impact reduced by income support measures from the governments.

With so many people unemployed and the ongoing pandemic, the road to economic recovery is still long. Therefore, it is entirely natural in these circumstances to sit down and think about your career, what you are doing good in it, and if it is time for a career change. If you are one of them, the following could interest you.

The benefits of Jinn Career Encyclopedia

The Jinn Career Encyclopedia is a database of occupations, skills, knowledge, education, and many other items relevant to your career. We filled all entries in there thanks to datasets from ESCO, an initiative from the European Commission to sort occupations, skills, and qualifications. We later added data from UNESCO to cover education. With such data, we make sure our encyclopedia is relevant to anyone worldwide, contrary to many other career databases, which remain specific to a market.

As of writing, it contains more than 16K articles, including 2927 articles about occupations. In comparison, Indeed has only 552 different works. So for people who recently lost their jobs or wondering if they should change careers, Jinn Career Encyclopedia can be a good place to start their research.

The other advantage is, like in every wiki, everybody can contribute, either by modifying an article or by creating a new article. It can be interesting if a subject you know well is not covered yet and makes the career database more relevant to users. We will explain later how you can edit an article.

How to use Jinn Career Encyclopedia

Browsing for occupations

The simplest way to get inspiration with Jinn Career Encyclopedia is to start browsing the occupations category. After all, a career change is most of the time synonymous with a job change. Or, if you already have an idea, you can use the search bar on top.

Every article about occupation is written according to this structure:

• Title: the name of the occupation
• Description: A brief description of the occupation
• Alternative labels: other ways to name this occupation
• Entry-level education: the minimum education requirement for the job
• Possible evolutions: other jobs requiring similar skills, either at a similar level, or at a higher level
• Essential and optional knowledge: The “must-have” knowledge and optional expertise you should have to fulfill your mission for a given occupation. Every knowledge links to another page where it is explained in detail
• Essential and optional skills and competencies: For a given occupation, the “must-have” skills you should master to fulfill your mission. Note that we call knowledge the outcome of the assimilation of information through learning. At the same time, skills mean applying knowledge and using know-how to complete a task. Once again, every skill links to another page.

At the bottom, you notice two buttons: one proposing to search for a job corresponding to the article (in that case, the searched terms are already entered), and another one with which you can post a job corresponding to the article. In that case, you need to fill the category of your job ad, but it is good practice to take the same one as the one in the article (the first two digits of the article category, just before the two buttons)

Browsing for skills or knowledge

When you read an article about a skill or some knowledge, the structure is slightly different, as it is more like:

• a description of the skill or knowledge
• a list of alternative labels, or other ways to name the skill of knowledge
• the type of skill, i.e., is it a skill that you acquire with experience or knowledge that you can learn in a training course
• the list of occupations where this skill or knowledge is considered as essentially
• the same list for optional skill or knowledge
• and a button linking to the course catalog, where you can learn this skill if a course exists about it.

Improving Jinn Career Encyclopedia

As said previously, Jinn Career Encyclopedia is a wiki. So, it is straightforward to modify the articles or create new articles if a topic of interest for you is not covered yet.

To do so, you can click on the pencil button at the bottom of every article.

Note also that the article category and tags are already set. You can add photos and videos to make the article easier to understand.

Jinn Career Encyclopedia use case: career change

To conclude this article, let’s make an example of using Jinn Career Encyclopedia.

We could consider we want a career change, but we are unsure what kind of change. But preferably, we want something where our previous experience is an asset. Note that I take this example only to make the demonstration simple, but this is also applicable for a more radical career change.

Light career change

Therefore, the first step is to enter the current occupation in the search bar. In this example, we will start with “truck driver.”

The first result is “moving truck driver”. When we open the page, we have an idea of what it is, other names for this job, the essential and optional skills and knowledge, and most importantly, possible evolution from this job position. There are two options: similar jobs, other jobs at an equivalent level, requiring similar skills to what a moving truck driver should know. And there are the potential promotions from this job, which is easy to understand.

Therefore, we could imagine changing the career of moving truck driver to dangerous goods driver or hoping for a promotion as desalination technician or a gas processing plant control room operator.

Of course, all these suggestions are still in development.

Significant career change: Jinn Career Advisor

The good thing with Jinn Career Encyclopedia is that it can suggest more radical career changes, although not directly. Jinn Career Encyclopedia is the basis for another excellent service, Jinn Career Advisor: an algorithm capable of providing job suggestions based on your experience, education, and preferred skills. This article explains well how to use this great tool.

Jinn Career Advisor is a great way to get career suggestions if you are a student, have a small or significant work experience, and are wondering about the next steps of your career. However, you should still not expect it will tell you what to do without a serious exercise of introspection, such as a personal SWOT analysis.

Wrap up

Jinn Career Encyclopedia in its current form can already be of interest in some circumstances. Still, we are working hard to make it better. Because it is a wiki, it can become even more relevant with your support. Combined with using other tools such as Jinn Career Advisor and self-assessment tools, it can help you find other activities more in line with your values.