Dictionary of Occupational Titles

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The Dictionary of Occupational Titles, commonly known as the DOT (Pronounced Dee-Oh-Tee) was the creation of the U.S. Employment Service, which used its thousands of occupational definitions to match job seekers to jobs from 1939 to the late 1990s.

Before 1939, nationwide occupational information was not conveniently reported by the Employment Service. By 1939, it had become clear to the Employment service that a standardized volume of job definitions was needed for employment-related purposes. The Employment Service published revisions of the DOT periodically with the final publication in 1991.

In the introduction to the 1991 revised fourth edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles, the Secretary of Labor, Lynn Martin, noted that "Since its inception, the Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) has provided basic occupational information to many and varied users in both public and private sectors of the United States economy. This revised Fourth Edition of the DOT appears at a time when there is growing recognition of the need for lifetime learning, when rapid technological change is making the jobs of current workers more complex than they were even a few years ago, and when timely and accurate labor market information is an increasingly important component of personal and corporate decision-making."

As computers became more sophisticated, the DOT approach was dropped by the Employment Service. The taxonomy of job classification that had evolved since the 1930s was abandoned and the Employment Service has adopted an entirely different framework and methodology for obtaining and delivering occupational information.

Although the DOT has been deemed obsolete and then abandoned by its the Employment Service and the Department of Labor, the data from the 1991 revised fourth edition of the Dictionary of Occupational Titles is used extensively at the Social Security Administration in litigation related to applications for Social Security disability benefits and Supplemental Security Income (SSI) for adult claimants. It is also relied upon in immigration adjudication within the United States.

Dictionary of Occupational Titles

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