The Global Standard in Skills
Comprehensive, transparent, and ready to use.
Our collection of 34,000+ skills comes from real-world use cases, honed by in-house experts, so you don't have to create a list yourself or rely on one you can't trust.
The Labor Market's Common Language
In a complex labor market where skill needs change fast, internal skill labels are inconsistent, and official classifications are often too slow or too broad, Lightcast provides the global standard in skills. Our taxonomy is the universal language that makes occupations and skills comparable across datasets, organizations, industries, and geographies. Our dedicated team of taxonomists and engineers cleans, checks, and updates each entry so that you always have the most accurate and up-to-date picture of the labor market.
The Lightcast Skills Taxonomy powers all of our solutions, from software to data delivery to professional services. You can also request access to the Lightcast Skills API and make sure your organization speaks the shared language of the external labor market.
See For Yourself: Explore The Taxonomy
Lightcast Skills Taxonomy: Under the Hood
Created by Experts
Lightcast Skills is created by a team of economists and labor market analysts who have worked with real-time labor market data for over 20 years. Nobody knows skills better.
Real Life Insight
We’ve gathered over 33,000 skills from hundreds of millions of online job postings and profiles from multiple sources—more than any other data provider. We also meticulously clean up and fact-check each skill before adding it to the library.
Pages and Pages
Every skill has its own unique page in the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy. Each page displays related skills, the top job titles and top companies posting for that skill, the job postings trend line over the last twelve months, and live job postings that you can click into to view that skill in real time (and most also have a Wikipedia definition for further clarity). Here's an example page for Javascript Programming Language Skills.
Define The Relationship
Skill categories and subcategories act as a way to logically group the skills in our library and create a hierarchy to easily view related skills. Categories are broad areas of expertise that map to career areas, and subcategories provide a group of skills specific to performing a specific aspect of a job. Learn more about Lightcast data taxonomies.
Open to Feedback
We’re constantly updating our skills library so it reflects the latest changes in the labor market. We add new skills, remove old ones, and tidy up terminology as necessary. Don’t see a skill? Suggest we add it.
Here To Help
Visit our Skills FAQ page for more detail on what Lightcast offers and how it works.
Ready to get started?
The Lightcast Skills Taxonomy provides clarity and structure for smoother workflows. Get in touch to start using it in your organization.
We're Creating A Job Market That Works For Everyone
Are you a nonprofit who wants to use Lightcast Skills in support of a public good? We'd love to help. When you register to use Lightcast Skills, we'll set you up with full access, free of charge.
Try it out! Explore these tools to see what the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy can do.
Skills Library
Browse Skills Categories
Skills Extractor
Job Posting Optimizer
More To Explore
Our skills solutions go beyond the taxonomy. Everyone involved with the labor market at any level can put skills to work—from individuals and educators to communities and businesses.