What Are Career Clusters?

This site focuses on over 180 "Bright Outlook" occupations, with "Bright Outlook" being defined by the Occupation Information Network (O*NET). (See the About the Data page for more information on this subject.)

With so many occupations, we needed an intuitive way to organize them, preferably one that would be recognized by educators and counselors (two of our target audiences). The National Career Clusters™ Framework fit the bill perfectly.

Within this framework, there are a total of 16 Career Clusters, and, to quote the source:

Each Career Cluster represents a distinct grouping of occupations and industries based on the knowledge and skills they require. The 16 Career Clusters and related Career Pathways provide an important organizing tool for schools to develop more effective Programs of Study (POS) and curriculum.(1)

Click on a cluster name to go to a specific Career Cluster page. The number of "Bright Outlook" occupations within a Career Cluster is in parenthesis to the right of the cluster name.

Note: An occupation can appear in more than one Career Cluster. For example, the "General and Operations Managers" occupation appears in both the "Business, Management and Administration" and "Government and Public Administration" Career Clusters.

• Agriculture, Food and Natural Resources (16)
• Architecture and Construction (31)
• Arts, Audio/Video Technology and Communications (4)
• Business, Management and Administration (33)
• Education and Training (10)
• Finance (12)
• Government and Public Administration (4)
• Health Science (54)
• Hospitality and Tourism (19)
• Human Services (20)
• Information Technology (10)
• Law, Public Safety, Corrections and Security (9)
• Manufacturing (14)
• Marketing, Sales and Service (20)
• Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) (11)
• Transportation, Distribution and Logistics (19)

Source(1): Career Technical Education Consortium