By Dr Rhonda Daniels AE, Pay and Conditions Standing Committee
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has recently completed a major review of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Classification of Occupations (ANZSCO). ANZSCO has long been used by the ABS to collect and report official data and statistics for government planning and policy making. ANZSCO has also been used by other government agencies and the private sector.
IPEd made several submissions to the review, calling for better recognition of the diversity of editing roles.
In December 2024, ABS announced that ANZSCO had been replaced by the first edition of the Occupation Standard Classification for Australia (OSCA). (The National Occupation List is replacing ANZSCO in Aotearoa New Zealand.)
There are several points to note about editing-related occupations in OSCA:
- ABS retired the occupation of Proof Reader, as requested by IPEd.
- ABS created the new occupation of Print or Digital Content Editor.
- ABS did not change the occupation of Book or Script Editor.
In January 2025, the ANZSCO review team wrote to IPEd about our submission to disaggregate the occupation of Book or Script Editor:
Thank you for your submission to the final round of the comprehensive ANZSCO review, and we apologise for the delay in responding. During this final round we received more than 200 individual submissions, and our focus was on major structure-related changes.
I’m writing regarding your request to disaggregate the occupation 231232 Book or Script Editor, and appreciate that the tasks performed by Book Editors differ to those of Script Editors. While we did not implement this change in the recently released OSCA classification, we are now entering the maintenance phase for the classification and will consider your request for inclusion in a future update to the classification.
Currently there are insufficient numbers of Script Editors to support a standalone occupation, so we would need to examine alternative options to make this split, in consultation with stakeholders with an interest in the affected occupations. We will also consider the treatment of 231333 Print or Digital Content Editor, given the overlap that you identified between this occupation and Book Editors.
We thank the review team for allowing us to include their response above and look forward to working with them on future changes.
Previous Gatherings article about our submission to ANZSCO, March 2022.