TaskNet: a worker-grounded view of occupational tasks
Stanford's TaskNet research builds task descriptions from workers' accounts of their jobs, then compares the resulting task catalogue with O*NET. This page summarizes the study's published scope and aggregate findings across six occupations. It is a research sample, not a complete occupation catalogue or an enterprise workflow map.
Study scope
A deliberately bounded set spanning professional, care, education and service work.
Interview participants across the six occupations.
Worker-reported task observations used in constructing the catalogue.
Published TaskNet task statements across the study occupations.
Stanford's project materials also report 318 task raters and 7,923 task ratings. Counts and definitions follow the linked study; they describe its research process, not a current workforce census.
Six occupations in the study
The table shows counts and study-reported construction-report coverage only. It intentionally omits task wording and task-level ratings; use Stanford's explorer for those details.
| Occupation | Tasks | Core | Supplemental | Workers | Task reports | Report coverage |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Software developers15-1252.00 | 44 | 40 | 4 | 21 | 468 | 87.4% |
| Lawyers23-1011.00 | 32 | 28 | 4 | 22 | 529 | 83.6% |
| Elementary school teachers25-2021.00 | 39 | 37 | 2 | 24 | 562 | 95.6% |
| Emergency medicine physicians29-1214.00 | 38 | 36 | 2 | 25 | 556 | 91.5% |
| Personal care aides31-1122.00 | 36 | 30 | 6 | 20 | 344 | 94.2% |
| Dishwashers35-9021.00 | 13 | 9 | 4 | 20 | 267 | 79.4% |
How the study compared TaskNet with O*NET
Held-out worker task coverage
89.3%vs78.6%
TaskNet compared with O*NET in the study's six-occupation evaluation.
Job-posting task coverage
72.5%vs70.2%
TaskNet compared with O*NET against postings in the same study.
These are reported evaluation results within the paper's selected occupations and methods. They do not establish that TaskNet is more complete for every occupation or that either catalogue represents a specific employer's workflow.
Tasks are evidence about work, not the whole business workflow
A task sits inside a workflow. To reconstruct how work runs in a particular organization, teams still need its business environment: systems and records, local rules, permissions, handoffs, exceptions, controls and decision owners. TaskNet provides occupational task research; it does not document those employer-specific conditions.