Open Skills Taxonomy

Uniting people, education, and work through a common skills language.

An open-source library of 32,000+ skills gathered from hundreds of millions of online job postings, profiles, and resumes—updated every two weeks.
Open Skills glow
Catagories
Extractor
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resume-optimizer-feature
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skillabi-feature
job-posting-optimizer-feature

Start Using the Open Skills API 

Access our skill library of over 30,000 skills. Each has a name, a unique machine-readable identifier, and a type (technical skill, human skill, certification/license). A limited number of skill extractions are also included.

Under the Hood

Created by experts

Lightcast Skills is created by a team of economists and labor market analysts who have worked with skills, traditional labor market information, and real-time labor market data for over 20 years.

Rooted in the real world

We’ve gathered over 30,000 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.

Machine-readable

Each skill has a machine-readable, unique, identifiable skill ID. Use our free skill-tagging prototype to translate your syllabus, resume, or your job posting into the common language of skills. Go ahead, check it out!

Updated every two weeks

We update our skills library every two weeks so you can trust it reflects the latest changes in the labor market. We add new skills, remove old ones, and tidy up terminology as necessary.

Open to feedback

We love collaboration and need your help. Don’t see a skill? Suggest it here. Don’t worry, we’ll vet it before it goes live!

Related skills

Send one or more skills to the API and it auto-populates related skills that show up together in the real world (i.e. in the same job postings). This feature is limited to 50 uses per month.

Many types of skills included

We include Common Skills (like communication or problem-solving), Specialized Skills (like Java or financial analysis), and Certifications and Licenses (like CompTIA Security+ or certified radiological nurse).

Skill pages

Every skill has its own unique page on skills.lightcast.io. Each page displays related skills, a Wikipedia definition, 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. Here's an example.

Skills extractor

Lightcast tools can identify skills within unstructured text (such as a job posting, resume, or syllabus). Our curated extraction model not only looks for skill keywords but also takes into account the context of the entire document.

Wikipedia definitions

For a more clear understanding of each specific skill, we use Wikipedia definitions whenever available, and you can also follow the link to view the entire Wikipedia page. Distributed under the CC BY-SA license.

Skill categories and subcategories

Skill categories 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.

Is this O*NET? 
How are skills selected for inclusion? 
Do you have definitions for each skill?