The Labor Department keeps detailed and at times delightfully odd records on the skills and tasks required for each job. Some of them are physical: trunk strength, speed of limb movement, the ability to stay upright. Others are more knowledge-based: economics and accounting, physics, programming. Together, they capture the essence of what makes a job distinctive.

What if you could start over and take the career path most different from the one you’re on? Let us help you.

Besides being an amusing exercise, exploring your opposite job has some value. Breaking a job into its component parts helps us look beyond the obvious and think clearly about the things that people actually do.

For instance, does your job require a lot of social skills, as is true for social workers, priests and psychologists? You are in luck. Many of the jobs with the most employment growth in the last few decades require listening and sharing skills that you learn in preschool.

Some skills are important for both relatively high-paying and low-paying jobs. The most prominent skill for waiters and waitresses is influencing others and selling, which is also an important skill for writers, salespeople and fashion designers.

The dynamic nature of our economy makes it difficult to capture the nuances in every job; our estimates simply point to which skills are used the most or least. A skill listed as used the least doesn’t necessarily mean it’s not something used at all; it’s just not used much relative to other jobs.