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

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.

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.

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!

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.

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!

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.