About Ochre

Ochre is the oldest art material on earth. People have been grinding it, mixing it with fat and water, and using it to mark bodies, walls and rock for tens of thousands of years, longer in Australia than almost anywhere else on the planet. Making art, in other words, might be the oldest career there is. It has just never stopped changing shape.

That is the whole idea behind this tool. An arts degree gets sold as a narrow path: gallery, teaching, or a long wait for either. In practice it opens into dozens of working lives that never get mentioned on open day, from courtroom sketching to prosthetic eyes to running your own studio. Ochre is a wider view of that same degree, not a verdict on which path is correct.

How the scores work

Every career in the dataset is scored 1 to 5 across nine dimensions, things like money, creative freedom and resistance to automation. When you move a slider, you are setting how much that dimension matters to you. The match percentage on each card is just those two sets of numbers multiplied together and normalised, nothing more mysterious than that.

Location and extra study tolerance sit outside that sum. They grey out or badge careers whose city size, remoteness or study requirements do not match what you have chosen, rather than hiding them, because the point is to show you the whole shape of what is possible.

The scores themselves are editorial judgements, made by looking at industry research, job ads and how these careers actually tend to play out, not a scientific instrument. Salary ranges are indicative Australian figures at establishment stage. Treat all of it as a starting point for your own research, not career advice.

Something wrong, or missing?

If a score looks off, a salary range is out of date, or you know a career that belongs in this deck, send a note.