What are the advantages of the NAICS and SOC classification schemes?
The advantages include: • NAICS and SOC ensure that economic statistics reflect our Nation s changing economy. They include industries and occupations that reflect changes in information services, health care, and high-tech manufacturing areas. • In switching to NAICS and SOC, the occupational safety and health statistics will conform to the classification system that will be used uniformly by all statistical agencies and provide more detail than the current systems. • NAICS and SOC, developed in cooperation with Canada and Mexico, allows for comparisons across North America, a desirable feature of statistical data for economic analysis of the global economy. • NAICS and SOC classification offers data collectors and micro-data users greater coding flexibility than the prior classification systems. NAICS and SOC has a six digit hierarchical coding system compared to four-digit in the prior systems.
