About the Advance CTE Crosswalker

Hi, I’m Leah Lykins. I’m a big fan of the National Career Clusters® Framework, and as you can see, WhereWeGo often leverages it in the data infrastructure of our partners’ tools. I built this tool as a WhereWeGo Lab build this month for two reasons:

1. We are modernizing a dual enrollment platform, and every dual enrollment coordinator will need to provide an Advance CTE Sub-Cluster for each of their course codes. We wanted to make that transition easier.
2. Many people will be in the same position as the country standardizes toward the Framework, especially after recent Perkins V legislation that requires it.

The Advance CTE Crosswalker is a free tool that translates the occupation, program, and industry codes you already use (SOC, O*NET, CIP, and NAICS) into their National Career Clusters® Framework equivalents: the Career Cluster and Sub-Cluster.

You can translate a single code to try it, or upload a CSV and download every row translated. It runs entirely in your browser.

The National Career Clusters® Framework is a standard structure, maintained by Advance CTE, for organizing the world of work into a small set of industry sectors. The 2024 modernized Framework organizes careers into 14 Career Clusters, each broken into smaller Sub-Clusters (72 in total), and aligns them to occupation (SOC), education program (CIP), and industry (NAICS) codes.

It gives schools, states, workforce partners, and employers a shared way to talk about careers. Read more at careertech.org →

Adoption is growing quickly. Advance CTE released the modernized National Career Clusters® Framework in 2024, and states, school systems, workforce boards, and employers are increasingly aligning to it.

Federal law reinforces the shift: the Perkins V Act requires states to organize career and technical education around career clusters, and those plans are becoming more tightly connected to state workforce plans under WIOA.

As more of the country adopts one shared career language, the Framework is fast becoming the common backbone that connects education, training, and jobs nationwide.

No. This tool is not an interpretation. It reports directly from Advance CTE’s Full Framework Crosswalk, which maps Career Clusters and Sub-Clusters to 6-digit SOC occupation codes and titles, 2020 CIP program codes and titles, and 2-digit NAICS industry sectors. Every result comes straight from that official crosswalk; we add no judgment of our own.

Advance CTE released the modernized National Career Clusters® Framework in 2024, and we keep this tool current with their latest crosswalk materials as they are published. Always check the official resource page for the current version and its publication date:

careertech.org/resource/framework-crosswalk →

When you enter or upload codes, the tool looks each one up in a pre-built index of the Advance CTE crosswalk and returns the matching Career Cluster(s) and Sub-Cluster(s).

• SOC and CIP codes return a cluster and sub-cluster.
• O*NET codes are resolved through their parent SOC code (the original code you typed is preserved in the output).
• NAICS sectors return a cluster only; NAICS is an industry sector, not an occupation-level key.

No. Everything runs locally in your browser. When you upload a CSV, the file is read and translated in the browser; nothing is sent to a server, stored, or shared.

This is a deliberate privacy promise; your codes never leave your machine.

Yes. A code can map to more than one cluster or sub-cluster, and the Framework treats every match as equal. The tool lists all matches in the order they appear and never ranks them.

O*NET-SOC codes extend a 6-digit SOC code with a two-digit suffix (for example, 15-2051.01). The crosswalk aligns clusters at the 6-digit SOC level, so the tool resolves an O*NET code through its parent SOC code. The full O*NET code you entered is preserved in the results and output.

NAICS is a 2-digit industry sector classification, not an occupation- or program-level code. The crosswalk maps each NAICS sector to one or more Career Clusters, but not to sub-clusters. SOC and CIP codes carry that fuller detail.

Upload a CSV with an input_code column and an optional input_type column (SOC, O*NET, CIP, or NAICS, in any case). Header names are flexible; code and type also work. Leave the type out and each row is auto-detected.

Codes are read as text, so leading zeros (CIP 01.0101) and O*NET suffixes stay intact. You can download results as one row per code (your file’s shape, with a column pair per match) or one row per match (long format, one row per cluster).

The Framework smooths transitions across many parts of the user experience in our education-to-career pipeline tools.

• High school · Dual Enrollment Navigation: in our dual enrollment navigation tool for Louisiana, we align every dual enrollment course to an Advance CTE cluster or sub-cluster.
• Upskilling · Training Navigation & worker-facing ETPLs: the Framework standardizes alignment across high-opportunity pathways and training programs, and gives workers a clear starting point in eligible training provider lists.
• Hiring · Jobs Navigation: in our regional, free applicant tracking system and job board, the Framework aligns employers’ posts with worker interest.
• Upward mobility & pivots · Career Mapping: clusters (including cross-cutting clusters) organize information about advancement within fast-growing industries such as green buildings, solar, and behavioral health.

See our tools →

WhereWeGo builds platforms that connect people to opportunities, made for the organizations doing the real work. WhereWeGo Labs is our experiment to produce one useful workforce tool for free every thirty days.

We built the Crosswalker because we kept needing to align occupation, program, and industry codes to the National Career Clusters® Framework across our own tools. A fast, private, browser-based translator made that easy. Explore more Labs experiments →

Yes, that is what we do. If you want to repair or modernize the tools in your education-to-career pipeline, contact Leah Lykins at leah@wherewego.org or see our work at wherewego.org/what-we-do.