About Shigoto Zukan & how to read the data

Shigoto Zukan ("job encyclopedia" in Japanese) is an occupation database that shows the present and the future of each job: median and average pay, the pay range, projected pay 5 and 10 years from now, AI replacement risk, labor demand, required skills and education, and career paths. It covers about 500 occupations in Japan and about 800 in the United States.

The 5 core indicators

Indicator	What it is
Pay	Median annual wage (US: BLS OEWS; Japan: average annual pay from the Basic Survey on Wage Structure via job tag)
Future pay	Projected pay in 5 and 10 years (Shigoto Zukan model)
Demand	US: BLS projected employment growth and annual openings; Japan: job-openings-to-applicants ratio
AI resistance	100 minus the AI replacement risk (0–100%)
Outlook score	Demand, pay momentum, pay level, AI resistance, retirements and entry barriers combined into a 0–100 score

Pay

US figures are the May 2025 (or latest) Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics (OEWS) from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics: median, mean and the 10th/25th/75th/90th percentiles of annual wages, national, all industries. Japanese figures are the average annual pay for the occupation's classification in the Basic Survey on Wage Structure, as published on the MHLW "job tag" site; ranges and pay by age are estimated from that average.

Projected pay

Projected pay = current pay × (1 + annual growth)^years. The annual growth starts from a base wage growth for the country (US 3.0%, Japan 1.8% per year), adds a premium for strong demand (US: BLS projected employment change; Japan: the openings ratio and the momentum of posted wages) and subtracts a drag for high AI replacement risk. A range is shown for the 10-year figure. These are estimates, not guarantees.

AI replacement risk

From the O*NET (US) and job tag (Japan) survey data on what each occupation actually does: activities such as processing information, documenting, repetitive tasks and working with computers raise the exposure; physical proximity to people, caring for others, manual dexterity, outdoor and physical work, negotiation and creative thinking lower it. The result is the occupation's percentile position among all occupations in that country, blended with a category-level prior.

Risk	Label
0–20%	Very low
21–40%	Low
41–60%	Moderate
61–80%	High
81–100%	Very high

Outlook score

Demand (25), pay momentum (15), pay level (15), AI resistance (25), retirements (10) and entry barriers (10). Each component is the occupation's percentile among all occupations in its country. Components that are not available for a country are left out and the rest are rescaled.

Updates

US wages are updated with each OEWS release (yearly), projections with each BLS Employment Projections release, and O*NET data with each database release. Japanese statistics are re-read weekly. Scores and projections are recomputed daily.