Occupations

Moves meaning between languages — and decides what to do when the meaning does not move cleanly.

Handles the transactions and the people at a branch counter — and is the bank's face for customers who need a human.

Writes words meant to make a specific person do a specific thing — and is judged on whether they did.

Answers customers who have a problem — and decides, case by case, what the company will do about it.

Keeps an office or an executive running: calendars, travel, expenses, documents, and every small thing that would otherwise stop.

Finds out how the software fails before users do — and is the person who says whether it is ready to ship.

Makes visual decisions on someone else's behalf — and defends them.

Does the reading, drafting and organising that lets a lawyer sign off — and is accountable for nothing being missed.

Takes payment, answers questions, restocks shelves and keeps a shop floor working — often all in the same hour.

Turns hours of footage into the minutes someone will actually watch — and decides what the story is in the process.

Records, reconciles and reports on an organisation's money — and increasingly, explains what the numbers mean to people who make decisions.

Gets a specific group of people to notice, want and buy something — across channels that change every year.

Turns a business question into a query, a query into a number, and a number into a decision someone will act on.

Turns a described problem into working, maintainable code — and, increasingly, decides whether generated code is actually right.

Finds, hires, pays, develops and sometimes removes the people a company runs on — inside rules that change by country.

Builds the model, writes the memo, and tells someone with money what the numbers mean before they commit it.

Finds out what happened from people who would rather not say, and publishes it under a name that can be held to account.

Receives, stores, picks and packs the goods that make online ordering work — at a pace set by a system.

Decides how a piece of software behaves for the person using it — screen by screen, state by state — and proves the decision with evidence.

Performs a defined step in making a physical product, hundreds of times a shift, to a standard someone else will check.

Takes professional responsibility for advice and for what gets filed — and carries the consequences when either is wrong.

Drives strangers across a city safely, on demand — and handles everything about them that is not driving.

Moves freight between places — and handles everything that goes wrong between the loading dock and the delivery.

Is the last check between a prescription and a patient — and the person who explains what the medicine will actually do.

Turns a client's need and a site's constraints into a building that can be approved, built and lived in — and signs for it.

Gets a specific parcel or meal from a shop to a door in a city, quickly, through weather, traffic and buildings the map does not understand.

Gets thirty specific children to learn something on a specific day — and holds the room together while doing it.

Produces consistent food at speed in a hot, cramped room — and adapts when the delivery is wrong and two cooks are off sick.

Keeps a patient safe and cared for through the hours when no doctor is in the room — and notices before the numbers do.

Installs, tests and repairs the wiring and equipment that everything else depends on — in buildings that are never quite as drawn.