Validate Facebook work position targeting IDs - facebook

Question

Our Facebook Ad system uses work position in its targeting spec as documented here: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/targeting-specs/v2.3#education_and_workplace
Sometimes Facebook deletes existing work positions and API requests to update the targeting spec fails:
{
"error":
{
"message": "Invalid parameter",
"type": "FacebookApiException",
"code": 100,
"error_subcode": 1487079,
"is_transient": false,
"error_user_title": "Invalid Targeting Spec",
"error_user_msg": "The specified targeting spec is not valid because: Job Titles with id 1542119359378854 is invalid."
}
}
The same happens with interest, but there is an API request to validate interests: https://developers.facebook.com/docs/marketing-api/targeting-search/v2.3#interest_validation
Is there something similar for work positions? (Probably undocumented?)
I could do requests to the /search/ API endpoint, but then I'd run into API request limits.

Answer 1

Unfortunately you are out of luck; there is no validation feature for work positions.
However, the example on the Facebook docs page you mentioned ([{'id':105763692790962, 'name':'Business Analyst'}]) seems to contain a working Facebook ID. Fetching e.g. https://graph.facebook.com/v2.2/105763692790962 will return the following output, so long as this profession exists:
{
"category": "Profession",
"name": "Business Analyst",
"id": "105763692790962"
}
This is of course not entirely what you are looking for, but if you want to limit the number of requests you make, you could implement your advertising app in such a way that it only tries to resolve professions by their ID once you run into trouble with your targeting spec. Getting back data for such a sanity check-request indicates that a work position is still valid. Should it not be valid any more, you can resort to using the /search endpoint to find a replacement.
You could also suggest that Facebook add this feature: https://www.facebook.com/help/suggestions