Field entry, published 2026-11-03T00:00:00.000Z, updated 2026-11-03T00:00:00.000Z. Group: Teaching and education occupations

How is teaching work spread across ISCO-08?

Teaching work in ISCO-08 is not gathered into a single box. The largest share sits among Professionals, in the teaching professionals group, where the level taught and the field of instruction shape the finer divisions. Around that centre, neighbouring work is placed by its main task instead of by its closeness to a classroom, so running a school, assisting a teacher, and training workers for a particular job can each fall elsewhere in the classification.

Broad kind of work	Broad ISCO-08 placement in general terms
Teaching at university, secondary, primary, early childhood, or vocational level	Professionals, teaching professionals
Other specialist teaching, including special education teaching	Professionals, other teaching professionals
Running an education institution or service	Managers, professional services management
Helping a teacher in the classroom	Service and sales workers, personal care work
Coaching, driving instruction, and similar specialist instruction outside formal schooling	Groups set by the field and setting of the instruction

Why does teaching sit in more than one major group?

ISCO-08 groups jobs by skill level and skill specialisation, meaning the complexity of the work and the field of knowledge it draws on. A university lecturer and a primary teacher share a high skill level and a teaching specialisation, even though their learners, subjects, and daily routines differ a great deal. A classroom assistant shares a school building with those teachers, yet the work itself is support work at a lower skill level, so the classification puts distance between them on purpose. The same logic moves a school principal away from the teaching groups, because planning, staffing, budgeting, and accountability for an institution are management tasks, not classroom teaching tasks, even when the person once taught.

What holds the professional teaching groups together?

Across the teaching professionals group, the common thread is planned instruction delivered to learners, with preparation, assessment, and guidance woven into the job. A teacher designs or follows a curriculum, presents material, checks understanding, and adjusts the next lesson in light of what learners show. Subject knowledge matters, and so does knowledge of how learners at a given stage learn, which is why the level taught becomes a strong organising line. A secondary teacher of mathematics and a secondary teacher of history sit near each other because both teach adolescents within a school curriculum, while a vocational teacher sits nearby but apart, because the instruction points toward an occupation and a workplace skill set.

How does level taught change the grouping?

Level taught is the first cut inside the teaching professionals group, before subject or institution type. University and higher education teaching forms its own area, secondary teaching forms another, and primary and early childhood teaching are treated as neighbouring but distinct areas, because the learners, the breadth of the curriculum, and the teaching methods differ sharply across those stages. Vocational teaching is separated again, because its purpose is preparation for employment in a trade or occupation, and its teaching often happens in workshops, laboratories, or simulated workplaces as well as classrooms. Special education teaching, by contrast, is grouped with other teaching professionals, since the defining feature is the specialist adaptation of teaching for learners with particular needs, rather than a single school level.

Where do support and management roles sit?

Classroom support sits apart because the main tasks are assistance, supervision, preparation of materials, and help with routines, rather than responsibility for planning and delivering a curriculum. That distinction survives even when an assistant is skilled, trusted, and central to a lesson, because ISCO-08 looks at the job as designed, not at the value of the person doing it. Management sits apart for a parallel reason. An education manager directs an institution, a department, or a service, sets priorities, oversees staff, and answers for results. Teaching experience may inform that work, and a manager may still teach a class, yet the classification follows the main task, so a job dominated by management belongs with managers.

What stays outside the teaching groups?

Work that instructs but does not belong to formal education is handled by its own logic. A sports coach, a driving instructor, or an instructor in a leisure activity teaches a skill, but the setting, the qualification framework, and the purpose differ from school or university teaching, so those jobs are grouped by their field. Workplace training raises a similar point. A worker who shows newcomers how to operate a machine as a small part of a production job is not thereby a teacher in ISCO-08 terms, while a person whose main job is to design and deliver training for an employer may sit with other teaching professionals or with a specialist group, depending on the field and the setting. Titles mislead here more than in most fields, because teacher, tutor, instructor, trainer, and coach are used loosely in everyday speech.

Reading the teaching groups well means starting from main tasks, then asking which level is taught, whether instruction is general or vocational, whether specialist adaptation is the point, and whether management or support dominates. A mixed job is placed by its main duty, which explains why two people in one school, with similar titles, can sit in different major groups.

Sources checked

1. ILO ISCO-08

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