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Glossary & sources

Every acronym, credential, dataset, and skill the writing and the instrument lean on, defined once and in plain language. We assume you know your own field, not ours. Three registers: the terms, the datasets behind the numbers, and the skill bank and the benefit bank, every skill linked to the open roles it unlocks.

ADDIEAnalysis, Design, Development, Implementation, Evaluation
The five-stage framework corporate instructional design is built on, and the vocabulary hiring managers screen for when a teacher applies for an instructional-design role. Knowing the word is often the difference between a resume that reads as “teacher” and one that reads as “instructional designer.”
AECArchitecture, Engineering, and Construction
The industry shorthand for the building world: the architects who design, the engineers who size, and the contractors who build. It is PivotHop’s launch vertical, and AEC postings are where the board’s Revit, BIM, and construction-administration chips come from.
APRNAdvanced Practice Registered Nurse
The license category covering nurse practitioners and similar advanced roles, requiring a graduate degree and national certification on top of an RN license. It is the legal gate on the registered-nurse-to-nurse-practitioner pivot.
AREArchitect Registration Examination
The multi-division exam a candidate passes to become a licensed architect in the United States, alongside a professional degree and documented experience hours.
ATSApplicant Tracking System
The software an employer uses to receive, filter, and rank job applications. Because many systems screen resumes for keywords before a human sees them, the exact vocabulary in a posting, ADDIE, Figma, dbt, often matters more than the underlying skill on the first pass.
BIMBuilding Information Modeling
The 3D, data-rich modeling method that has replaced 2D drafting across much of architecture and engineering, with Revit the dominant tool. BIM coordination is the shared language that makes the architect-to-MEP-engineer move unusually smooth.
CC BYCreative Commons Attribution license
The open license that permits reuse, including commercial reuse and redistribution of derived numbers, as long as the source is credited. Several of the datasets behind PivotHop, the CPS mobility network and JobHop among them, are CC BY, which is what makes them legally usable in a product that charges.
CFAChartered Financial Analyst
A demanding, multi-exam credential for investment and financial-analysis professionals. It is not required for most corporate financial-analyst roles, but it widens the pay gap over accountants who make the switch.
CPACertified Public Accountant
The license for accountants who sign audits and handle certain public filings. Required for some accounting roles, not for financial analysis, which is part of why the accountant-to-analyst move is common.
ETLExtract, Transform, Load
The process of pulling data out of source systems, reshaping it, and loading it into a warehouse where analysts can use it. Building and maintaining ETL pipelines is the core of data engineering, and ETL fluency is exactly what a data analyst already holds when they consider that move.
FAAFederal Aviation Administration
The US aviation regulator whose certifications gate pilot and flight-attendant roles. It appears here in transferable-skills examples, where a licensed destination sets the real timeline.
FEAFinite Element Analysis
The numerical method engineers use to simulate how a structure or part behaves under load, by breaking it into a mesh of small elements. FEA fluency is the degree-shaped core of the architect-to-structural-engineer gap: reading structural drawings is not the same as producing the analysis behind them.
FF&EFurniture, Fixtures, and Equipment
The specification and procurement of everything that goes into a space but is not structure, from chairs to lighting. FF&E and procurement are the commercial half of interior design that architects most often have not run, and the main gap in the architect-to-interior-designer move.
FINRAFinancial Industry Regulatory Authority
The self-regulatory body whose licenses (the Series 7 and others) are required to sell securities. FINRA licensing enters the picture only for securities-facing financial-analyst roles, not corporate FP&A.
FP&AFinancial Planning and Analysis
The forward-looking side of corporate finance: building budgets, forecasting revenue, and explaining variances, as opposed to accounting, which records what already happened. FP&A is the usual landing spot for an accountant moving into a financial-analyst role.
GD&TGeometric Dimensioning and Tolerancing
The symbolic language that specifies the allowable variation on a manufactured part, standard on product and mechanical drawings. It belongs to product-side mechanical engineering, one reason that half of the field is a separate education from building mechanical.
GEO / AEOGenerative / Answer Engine Optimization
The newer discipline of getting a brand or page cited inside AI-generated answers (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google’s AI Overviews) rather than ranked as a link. Proprietary, verifiable data is the strongest lever, because it is what AI answers quote.
HVACHeating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning
The building-comfort systems trade, and by extension the technician occupation that installs and services them. HVAC technician is one of the least-remote occupations we track: hands-on, on-site, and licensed.
JaccardJaccard index
A measure of how similar two sets are: the number of items they share divided by the total number of distinct items across both. For two occupations it is the skills they have in common divided by every skill either one demands, so it runs from 0 (no overlap) to 1 (identical). PivotHop ranks career routes first by coverage, the share of the destination’s skills the origin already has, and uses the Jaccard index as the tiebreaker, because it rewards pairs that are close in both directions rather than one role simply being a superset of the other.
LARELandscape Architect Registration Examination
The licensing exam for landscape architects in most US states. Because architecture licensure rarely reciprocates into it, the architect-to-landscape-architect move is a second license, not a specialization.
LEEDLeadership in Energy and Environmental Design
The most widely used green-building certification, run by the US Green Building Council. LEED credentials show up in architecture, engineering, and construction postings as a signal of sustainability fluency.
LLMLarge Language Model
The class of AI system, GPT and its peers, trained on vast amounts of text to generate and reason over language. “LLM experience” has gone from exotic to expected in AI-adjacent job postings in the space of about two years.
LMSLearning Management System
The platform (Canvas, Moodle, and corporate equivalents) that hosts and tracks online courses. LMS familiarity is one of the tooling gaps between classroom teaching and corporate instructional design.
MEPMechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing engineering
The building-systems engineering disciplines that sit alongside architecture on every project. Because architects coordinate MEP work for years, MEP engineering is the closest lateral move on our graph for many of them.
MLOpsMachine Learning Operations
The engineering discipline of running machine-learning models in production reliably: deploying them, monitoring them, retraining them, and rolling them back when they fail. It is the part of the job that separates a machine-learning engineer, who keeps the model running, from a data scientist, who proves it works.
MSN / DNPMaster of Science / Doctor of Nursing Practice
The graduate degrees a registered nurse must earn to become a nurse practitioner. They are the real timeline behind that move, two to four years, which a skill-readiness number alone does not show.
NLCNurse Licensure Compact
The interstate agreement, now covering more than 40 states, that lets a nurse practice across member states on one license. It expands where a nurse can work, but not how remote the work is, because the patient still has to be physically cared for.
PEProfessional Engineer license
The state license that lets an engineer take legal responsibility for work, “sign and seal” drawings, in civil, structural, mechanical, and electrical practice. It gates responsible-charge roles but not every product or coordination seat, a distinction that matters for architects eyeing an engineering pivot.
PLCProgrammable Logic Controller
The ruggedized industrial computer that runs machinery and process automation. PLC and circuit design mark the boundary between the building-electrical work an architect can pivot into and the power-and-product electrical engineering that requires going back to school.
PMP / CAPMProject Management Professional / Certified Associate
The most recognized project-management certifications, run by the Project Management Institute, with CAPM the entry-level version of the PMP. A PMP is the common signal that converts a business analyst’s experience into project-manager offers, and unlike a license it takes months, not years.
PMSProperty Management System
The operations software a hotel runs on: reservations, room inventory, billing. Hospitality postings ask for specific systems by name, Opera being the common one, and PMS fluency is to a front-office career what an ATS is to recruiting: the tool you cannot skip.
PPPPurchasing Power Parity
The exchange rate at which a basket of goods costs the same in two countries, as opposed to the market rate. The remote salary calculator uses World Bank price levels derived from PPP to compare pay across countries by what money actually buys.
PSYPACTPsychology Interjurisdictional Compact
An interstate agreement that lets a psychologist practice, including by telehealth, across the 40-plus member jurisdictions on a single authorization. It is the reason psychologists post far more remote roles than other licensed clinicians.
RAGRetrieval-Augmented Generation
A technique that lets a large language model answer from a specific set of documents by fetching relevant passages first and feeding them to the model, instead of relying only on what it memorized during training. It has become a standard skill in AI-engineering and machine-learning postings.
RTOReturn to Office
The wave of employer mandates, from 2023 onward, requiring workers back on site full or part time after the remote experiment of 2020 to 2022. RTO policy is one of the forces reshaping which occupations post remote roles and which do not.
SEOSearch Engine Optimization
The practice of shaping content and sites so they rank in search results. As answer engines and AI overviews absorb more queries, the discipline is shifting from ranking blue links to being cited inside AI answers, a change sometimes called GEO or AEO.
SOCStandard Occupational Classification
The federal coding system that assigns every job in the United States a number, so a “software developer” in one dataset can be matched to a “software developer” in another. The Bureau of Labor Statistics maintains it and revises it every few years, and most US labor data (wages, projections, mobility) is keyed to it. PivotHop uses SOC codes to join live postings to official wage and separation figures.
SQLStructured Query Language
The standard language for querying databases, and the load-bearing skill shared by data analysts and data engineers. SQL fluency is why the analyst-to-engineer move starts from a position of strength.
UXUser Experience design
The practice of designing how a product feels to use: research, information architecture, interaction, and testing, as distinct from visual or graphic design. UX roles pay well above graphic-design roles and are projected to grow faster, which is why the graphic-designer-to-UX move is one of the most searched career changes.
WCAGWeb Content Accessibility Guidelines
The W3C standard for making websites usable by people with disabilities, cited by level, with AA the common bar. Accessibility appears in UX, front-end, and content postings as a named skill, and public-sector work increasingly requires it outright.
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