对于一个人口群（PoP）来说，最重要的属性便是他们的职业，这反映了人口群（PoP）在他们工作的建筑物中所从事的工作类型。人口群（PoP）的职业决定了其社会阶层，并可能影响其工资、政治实力、它可能有资格从事的其他职业，以及它倾向于支持哪些政治利益集团。鼓励和扶植特定的人口群（PoP）并使他们进入本国所鼓励的职业是维多利亚 3 的“社会建设”游戏玩法的关键。
改变职业
所有的人口群（PoP）都有一个职业。建筑物需要特定职业的人口群（PoP）才能在其中工作，以使它们对经济和社会产生预期的影响。不同的生产方式会改变建筑物中所需的专业职位数量。
玩家可以选择在哪些地区创造特定的工作岗位，并选择合适的生产方式加强人口群（PoP）的生产效率和产量，并对当地产生对应的影响。在游戏中，这些选择所产生的效果是可预期的，你可以在选择建设工作建筑物以及改变生产方式时看到其效益变化。相同的职业，在不同的建筑中，对应不同的生产方式，也会产生不同的效果。这意味着，就其本质而言，高收入的人口群（PoP）并没有比低收入的人口群（PoP）更“高端”——相反，它们都是社会上的一颗螺丝钉，是有机的、不可或缺的组成部分。每一个生产场所中的职业能否正常发挥生产力，都取决于其上下游的其他生产场所中的职业是否正常工作——没有足够的劳工来挖煤，工程师就无法制造发动机；没有裁缝来缝制衣服，店主没有衣服可卖。
人口群（PoP）改变职业是游戏系统自动完成的，无需玩家直接控制。尽管如此，玩家仍然应该了解其背后的机制。这可以帮助玩家确保其中一个地区的人口能够提前做好快速工业化前的准备，或者确保他们不会因为急剧的社会变革而造成阶层跌落进而引发起义。
职业种类
人口群（PoP）共被划分为15个职业 (以及失业者
) ，并被分为三个社会阶层:
Lower strata
Clerks
Farmers
Laborers
Machinists
Peasants
Servicemen
Slaves
Middle strata
Academics
Bureaucrats
Clergymen
Engineers
Officers
Shopkeepers
Upper strata
Aristocrats
Capitalists
Employment
Employees are hired into available jobs from the pool of pops that already exist in the state, but unless they're unemployed these pops will already have a job somewhere doing something else. Any openings will be first offered to existing engineers and only then to other qualified pops. Buildings won't hire pops who don't meet the qualifications for the profession in question.
Pops can be hired under two conditions:
- They must be offered a measurably higher wage than the wage they're currently getting from their current employment.
- Unless they already work as the required profession in another building, they must also meet the qualifications of that profession to change into it.
Wages
Buildings adjust their wages, in response to market conditions, to achieve full employment with minimal wage costs. A building that has open jobs it can't seem to fill will raise wages until it either fills the necessary positions or runs out of excess profits. Buildings won't increase wages if this would cause them to go into deficit. In fact, a building that is losing money will decrease wages until it's back in the black so there's little point to expanding industries beyond the point where they're profitable.
The wage adjustment leads to different buildings in the same state to compete for the available workforce. What this means in practice is that a large population with the necessary qualifications to perform all the jobs being created in the state will keep wages depressed and profits high. Only when industries are large or advanced enough that they need to compete with each other for a limited pool of qualified workers are wages forced to rise.
As employment increases, so does the throughput -- the degree by which the building consumes input goods and produces output goods. According to supply and demand laws this makes a building less profitable per capita the closer to full employment it gets. That said, the rise in wages also comes with increased consumption, which increases demand for goods and services that some of the same buildings may profit from in the end.
Qualifications
A pop's qualifications measure how many of its workforce qualify for certain professions. The number of qualified members within that pop is updated on a monthly basis depending on how well their current properties match up to the expectations of the profession in question. For example, a pop's potential to become an engineer is increased if they have a higher literacy, are wealthier or if they work in an adjacent field such as a machinist. The number of potential engineers will continue to rise as long as they meet the profession's required qualifications. Different professions will have different requirements. For example, at least a basic education level is required to become a machinist while a much higher one is required to become an engineer. Conversely, the ability to become an aristocrat is less about education and more about social class and wealth.
Qualified members being hired by a building will be split to a new pop belonging to the new profession and the workforce size of the old pop will be reduced by an equal number. If all the qualified members for a certain profession were hired than the old pop won't accumulate any more members for that profession. The new pop will have its members retain the qualifications of their old profession. For example, newly hired engineers which used to be machinists will retain their machinist qualifications. Furthermore, if those new engineers used to be farmers before becoming machinist then they would retain their farmer qualifications as well.
Like all pop attributes, qualifications follow the pops as they split, merge, move between buildings, migrate, and die. This means that unless new pops are given the option to acquire the qualifications for a certain profession then when the old pop dies away there will be no qualified pops to replace them. This will lead the buildings that requires them to underperform until such pops will arrive at the state by some other way.
The intent of qualifications is to signal the player what capacity for employment they have available among any subset of their population. They cannot, for example, conquer a state filled with under-educated people they also legally discriminate against and expect to immediately build up a cutting-edge manufacturing- and trade center there. These efforts will be throttled by their inability to employ the locals into highly qualified positions, meaning they have to wait for members of their already qualified workforce to migrate there from the old country to take on any high-status positions created for them. But by building out their education system, paying bureaucracy to extend their administrative reach to the new state through incorporation, and changing their laws to extend citizenship to these new residents, they can start to build this capacity also in the locals.
In summary, qualifications is the mechanism by which access to education and the country's stance on discrimination -- in addition to many other factors -- impact the player's ability to expand different parts of their society. It is also the mechanism that sorts pops logically into the economic (and thereby political) niches being carved out as the country expands, ensuring the laws and economic conditions inform the social mobility of pops based on who they are. While generally subtle, it will become more apparent after running into the challenges caused by rapid industrialization, mass migration, conquests, colonization, and other drastic population shifts.
References
- To update page content see reference files in folder Victoria 3\game\common/pop_types:
- Each profession has its own
txtfile (named after the profession).
- Each profession has its own