Keywords for your occupation: build your bank in 30 minutes

Why look for your occupation’s keywords beyond one posting?

A posting reflects the words of one employer, sometimes of the one person who wrote it. Official occupation descriptions, on the other hand, gather the vocabulary recognized across the country: job titles, duties, skills and knowledge. Starting from these sources, you build a keyword bank you can reuse for every application. This guide shows where to find them, with a ready-to-fill template and a complete example.

The method is especially useful in three cases: you are changing careers and do not know the new field’s vocabulary yet, you come from another country where job titles differ, or your field publishes few postings. To turn these words into resume sentences, see our guide to action verbs and keywords.

Where can you find the job titles for your occupation?

Start with the National Occupational Classification (opens in a new tab) (NOC). Each occupation has a code and a list of example job titles: these are the titles employers actually use for the same work.

Take profile 12200 in OaSIS (opens in a new tab), Employment and Social Development Canada’s Occupational and Skills Information System (2025 version). Under "Accounting technicians and bookkeepers", the example titles include "accounting technician", "bookkeeper", "accounting bookkeeper", "bookkeeping clerk", "finance technician" and "senior bookkeeper". So many titles, so many ways a posting can name your job.

Write them all down: they work for your job alerts as well as your resume headline. Our guide to job alerts explains how to create one alert per variant.

Where can you find recognized duties and skills?

The same OaSIS profile lists the occupation’s main duties, for example "keep financial records and establish, maintain and balance various accounts using manual and computerized bookkeeping systems". It also rates the complexity of work activities: for this occupation, "documenting and recording information" and "processing information" are among the high-level activities.

Job Bank adds a skills and knowledge (opens in a new tab) page for each occupation (French page modified September 24, 2026). For accounting technicians, numeracy is rated at the highest level, attention to detail is considered extremely important, and accounting and clerical work are advanced-level knowledge.

These terms are not keywords to copy as they are, but leads: "attention to detail" becomes, in a resume, an achievement that proves it, such as "monthly bank reconciliations with no discrepancies over 18 months".

How do you build your keyword bank?

Copy this template and fill it in for your occupation:

Then validate the bank against five recent postings in your region:

1. Highlight each term from your bank that appears in the postings.
2. Add terms that come up in at least two postings, especially named tools and software.
3. Keep only what you can prove with experience, training or a project.
4. Sort into three groups: already in your resume, to make visible, to acquire.

The third group becomes your training plan: it tells you what to learn first.

How do you adapt the method to a career change or a foreign job title?

If you are changing careers, open two OaSIS profiles side by side: your current occupation and the one you are targeting. The duties and skills they share are your transferable skills; put them near the top of your resume, with an example for each. The skills that appear only in the new profile tell you what to learn, or what to prove with a project.

If your job title comes from another country, do not look for a word-for-word equivalent: search the NOC for the occupation whose main duties match what you actually did. The right code then gives you the Canadian vocabulary, the titles to use in your job alerts and the wage data for your region, as our guide to salaries by occupation explains. For how to present the resume itself, see our career change resume guide. Keep a short note of the code you chose and why, so you can explain it in an interview if asked.

How do you use the bank without copying postings?

Reuse the job-specific terms, not the sentences. The Government of Alberta notes, in its article on applying for jobs in the age of AI resumés (opens in a new tab), that recruiters see wording identical to the posting as a red flag. Each keyword should therefore come with a fact: a result, a volume, a tool, a timeframe.

Put the most important terms in your headline, your profile and the first lines of each job, then check the whole document with our 15-point resume checklist.

How can Postulio help?

Postulio’s job posting analysis compares a posting with your profile: skills you already show, skills to make visible and requirements to check, which speeds up validating your bank against each posting. CV Studio then lists the words from the posting that are missing from your resume. You decide what is true and relevant; no tool can guarantee an interview.

Sources

• Employment and Social Development Canada, National Occupational Classification (opens in a new tab) — occupation codes and example job titles.
• Employment and Social Development Canada, OaSIS profile 12200.00 (opens in a new tab) — job titles, main duties and work activity complexity (OaSIS 2025 Version 1.0).
• Job Bank, accounting technician skills (opens in a new tab) — skills, personal attributes and knowledge by level (French page modified September 24, 2026).
• alis, Government of Alberta, Applying for jobs in the age of AI resumés (opens in a new tab) — wording identical to the posting seen as a red flag.