Career Coach API Breaking Changes: Updated Categories and Pathways

This is to update that, Datarun 2025.2 is now live, and those who need to can start opting out of 2025.3. To do this, add query parameter datarun=2025_2 to your queries, please refer to our previous message for more information.

Lightcast is releasing the US 2025.3 datarun on August 11th. To consume the updated data when it becomes available, no action will need to be taken.

However, with US 2025.3, Lightcast is changing the Categories and Pathways to align more closely to the updates released by O*NET in April 2025. These changes may cause some breaking changes depending on how you’re consuming the Careers API. Specific attributes being updated:

1. Category

• Name
• Description - Please note that Lightcast has modified the descriptions from O*NET to be more engaging to  Career Coach’s audience. If you’d rather use the original O*NET descriptions, you can find them within this site.
• Id
• O*NETs assigned to the categories

2. - Pathway

• Name
• Description - Please note that Lightcast has slightly modified the descriptions from O*NET to remove the term “sub-cluster”. If you’d rather use the original O*NET descriptions, you can find them within this site.
• Id
• O*NETs assigned to the pathways

If desired, you may opt out of 2025.3 before it’s released to preserve your calls until you have a chance to update them. To do this, add query parameter datarun=2025_2 to your queries. You’ll be able to stay on 2025.2 until the release of 2025.4 in Q4.

Please note that this parameter won’t work until 2025.2 is released, which is scheduled to be released by May 22, 2025.

We know this is a slight deviation from our standard way of allowing you to adjust to breaking changes, so if you have any questions or run into any problems, please reach out to customersupport@lightcast.io.