The accelerated pace of urban-rural integration and development has pushed the harmonization of occupation and residence functions in rural areas to gradually become an important factor affecting the sustainable development of the region. In this paper, Jilin Province, a classic agricultural province, is taken as the study area to explore the synergistic evolution law of occupation and residence functions. Based on the gray correlation analysis algorithm, the two-way gray correlation model based on slope difference is proposed from the similarity perspective, using the two-way gray correlation based on slope difference to represent the difference in the rate of change. At the same time, the existing rural vocational education supply and demand problems in Jilin Province are analyzed to reflect the structural causes of its rural vocational status quo. And from the three major perspectives of residence, production and ecology, the rural territory is divided into six major functional areas. A two-way gray correlation model based on slope difference is applied to analyze the changes in the structure of rural occupations in different functional zones in Jilin Province, in which the highest percentage of rural agricultural occupations in the urban functional expansion area and the new urban development area is only 38.36%. The advancement of urbanization development has subconsciously affected the adjustment and upgrading of rural occupational structure while diluting the rural residential function and promoting the functional diversification of rural areas.
