Five tools to check career claims

Career advice online runs on confidence, not sources. The fix is knowing where the official data lives. Any claim worth acting on can be checked.

The five tools

• **O*NET OnLine** — what any U.S. job actually involves: tasks, tools, knowledge, abilities. Kept current by surveying people who do the work. Use it when someone tells you what "your job really is."
• [The Occupational Outlook Handbook](https://www.bls.gov/ooh/) — the Bureau of Labor Statistics' plain-English profiles: what the work is like, typical entry paths, pay ranges. Use it before believing any salary claim.
• [BLS Employment Projections](https://www.bls.gov/emp/) — the official ten-year outlook for hundreds of occupations. If a prediction about a job "growing" or "disappearing" doesn't trace to numbers like these, treat it as opinion.
• [CareerOneStop](https://www.careeronestop.org/) — the Department of Labor's free career-planning toolbox: self-assessments, training finders, local job data.
• **O*NET Related Occupations** — the public dataset of which jobs genuinely overlap. Use it to sanity-check any "you could easily switch to X" claim.

How to use them in five minutes

• Someone makes a claim about your job or a move you're considering.
• Find your occupation on O*NET or in the Outlook Handbook.
• Compare what the official page says with what you were told.
• If they disagree, trust the source you can check — and ask the claimant for theirs.

A note on paywalled "reports"

If a career product won't show you where its numbers come from, that is the answer. Official U.S. labor data is public and free; anything built honestly on top of it can afford to link back. That's the standard we hold ourselves to as well — every claim in our reports links to a source you can open.