Random Job Generator

How the Random Job / Occupation Generator works

How the random job generator works

A job is the fastest way to give a character a life, because an occupation carries a place, a routine, a set of skills, a class and a wardrobe all at once, and the sector select is what matches it to the story or the exercise: a crime novel wants a locksmith, a pathologist and a probation officer, a village drama wants the greengrocer and the vet, a workplace comedy wants an office of claims handlers and account managers, an improv round wants a job that can be mimed, and a careers lesson or a survey mock-up wants a realistic spread across the economy. The sectors are the everyday groupings a person would use rather than an official classification: trades and crafts, office and professional, health and care, shops and hospitality, arts and media, science and tech, public service, outdoors and transport, and a historical list of the trades that made surnames, cooper, fletcher, chandler, and the vanished jobs of the last two centuries, lamplighter, knocker-up, telegraph operator, for period fiction. The forms add the detail a character sheet needs: a seniority, "junior", "locum", "self-employed", "semi-retired", changes the age and the income; an employer, "at the council", "for a family business", "at a startup", gives a workplace and a set of colleagues; the retired or former form is the backstory job that explains what a character knows; the side-job form, "bus driver by day, drummer by night", is a whole character in one line; and the sentence form is ready to paste into a persona, a survey response or a fixture.

The jobs are ordinary British occupations in the words people use for them, GP, solicitor, postman, publican, and the employers are generic, so a result is a random combination and describes no real person; the years-in-post and the seniorities are random and may not quite fit, a trainee with thirty years' service, which is what a reroll is for. The draw is uniform within a sector and is not weighted by how many people do the job, so a lighthouse keeper is as likely as a nurse.

For the character who holds the job, the Character name page in the People section; for the firm they work at, the Company name and Shop name pages in the Business section; for a hobby to go with the job, the Random hobby page; for a fantasy or a historical trade to match a setting, the Guild name and Medieval profession pages in the Fantasy section; and for a whole persona at once, the User persona page in the Business section.

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