Can you track an individual's occupational field (like we can track industry for Organizations)?

@Jennifer Warner Yes, in the business section of the record (located on the Bio 1 Tab), there is the field called Profession. But be careful, I have seen organization list positions (there is already a field for that) instead of the category of the profession. No need to make this an attribute since the field already exists and you can add to it. But again, keep it clean and do junk it up like I have seen other folks do.

@Jennifer Warner I'm not sure what you are looking for here either. @Joe Moretti and @JoAnn Strommen have stated that these are the places for this information. Organizations have this info on their Org 2 tab already.

Are you looking for something that refers to the type of company, or the role the person has in the organization? I'm always a little hesitant to record this data, as people change careers and industries all the time. At least the company will still stay in the same industry.

@Jennifer Warner As I read your post it sounded like you want to know what my occupational category is as an individual with a record. So I would record it here:

Of course a person's industry category can change with a job change. So if you record my new primary employment, the new industry would be recorded on the org relationship record. Much easier IMO than remembering to go update an attribute. Also, able to have access to view current and former data.

If this is not what you're looking for perhaps you could clarify.

@Jennifer Warner I guess I'm just really narrow on my thinking of using attributes. We have so many attributes that are useless info that have accumulated over the years. I would still consider an org/business relationship. Viewing in webview for some records is pages and pages. So I lean toward the relationship…

For those working, primary relationship profession is clergy and for those not currently serving in that capacity, a separate bus/org relationship could record their “clergy” profession (instead of industry).

LOL, make your case Dariel.

@JoAnn Strommen: LOL. I like that. But since you called me out, let me just make it clear. In this case, for something like clergy, which isn't actually a profession per se, but something a little different, I think it only makes sense to use an attribute.

For instance, if a person is a member of the clergy, they may have a relationship record for their church/temple/mosque, etc. They may also be a chaplain at the local hospital or have a completely different profession. Let's say that they are also a plumber by trade, and work for a local company. All of those are potential organizational relationships, and not all of them apply to a profession of “clergy”.

In this case, if you are searching for a group of constituents that are clergy, it only makes sense to me to set this as an attribute that makes it easier. That also reduces the potential for duplicates as you'll only have one attribute for this per constituent, as opposed to a potential one-to-many set of organizational records. In the example above, you had 3 potential organizational records associated with the constituent, and 2 which could potentially have the profession of “clergy”. If queried, they would present the possibility of having duplicates in the results.

I understand the bias against creating another attribute, but I think this is the best route. However, I also think if you wanted to repurpose some of the fields on Bio 2, I wouldn't be mad at that either. Especially since there's already a religion table here, but that only works for clergy.

@Jennifer Warner I guess I'm just really narrow on my thinking of using attributes. We have so many attributes that are useless info that have accumulated over the years. I would still consider an org/business relationship. Viewing in webview for some records is pages and pages. So I lean toward the relationship…

For those working, primary relationship profession is clergy and for those not currently serving in that capacity, a separate bus/org relationship could record their “clergy” profession (instead of industry).

LOL, make your case Dariel.

@Joe Moretti I agree with you, I would use industry/profession. I would consider it a profession - surely someone is not necessarily clergy for life just because they once held that position. In the (admittedly unlikely!) event that they were to renounce their religion tomorrow and get a job delivering pizzas ? instead, presumably we wouldn't still want to consider them clergy, therefore their clergy status is connected to their current job. If a piece of information's related to employment then I think it belongs on the employment record, otherwise you risk it getting out of sync with other parts of the constituent record.

If we know that someone works in a particular field but don't know the name of the current employer, we just enter “not known” in the organisation name field and then we can still record the industry they're in.