Frequently Asked Questions

In Lightcast's Skills Taxonomy, skills are competencies at specific tasks or familiarity with specific subjects and tools acquired through education or experience. Each skill is classified as a specialized skill, common skill, or certification.

Specialized Skills – Skills that are primarily required within a subset of occupations or equip one to perform a specific task (e.g. "NumPy" or "Hotel Management"). Also known as technical skills or hard skills.

Common Skills – Skills that are prevalent across many different occupations and industries, including both personal attributes and learned skills. (e.g. "Communication" or "Microsoft Excel"). Also known as soft skills, human skills, and competencies.

Certifications – Recognizable qualification standards assigned by industry or education bodies (e.g. “Cosmetology License” or “Certified Cytotechnologist”).

We select skills that we know are relevant to people, employers, and educators—meaning, they are commonly listed on real-world resumes, professional profiles, and job postings. We gather and analyze millions of these skills each month and also take suggestions from the community. You can suggest a skill.

Yes, we have definitions for all skills in our library. The skills in our Open Skills Library reflect their current common usage, so in order to provide context, we link most skills to Wikipedia articles. We also include brief descriptions from Wikipedia for those skills that are linked, distributed under the CC BY-SA license.

We use two types of taxonomies. One is a traditional defined category and subcategory hierarchy taxonomy that is tagged on each skill to show relationships between skills. The other is a dynamic taxonomy that lets our classification rise organically from the skills and the relationship between skills in our aggregate supply and demand data. Due to the rapidly changing nature of the labor market, we let the relationships between skills emerge from real-world relationships, instead of solely organizing skills into these pre-existing categories that may or may not reflect current trends.

Read about our dynamic taxonomic data or contact us to learn more.

We offer an API, rather than a downloadable list, because skills are constantly changing. An API gives you access to the most up-to-date dataset of these evolving skills, whereas a downloadable list would be static and therefore quickly out of date. This is also why we update our skills monthly.

No. The acceleration of technological change in recent decades has made top-down, highly structural approaches like O*NET difficult to maintain and keep relevant.

We release a new version of the library monthly. Each release contains new skills and updates to how existing skills are identified. You can visit the changelog to get a sense of the project’s velocity.

Absolutely! Suggest a skill to add.

We’ll help you! We provide services that can extract skills from raw text within job postings, resumes, professional profiles, and course descriptions. Once we extract those skills, you’ll be able to read these postings, resumes, etc., in the language they’re written in: the language of the real world.

Want to get started? Contact us.

It’s the advantage of comparing apples to apples. Now that we’re speaking the same language, we can take your data and compare it with our massive database of postings, resumes, and profiles. We’ll be able to tell you whether your students are actually learning the skills they need, which companies are looking for people with these skills, and more.

This means colleges can align curriculum to the ever-changing job market, schools and organizations can help students and jobseekers to craft more powerful resumes that showcase in-demand skills, and businesses can create better job postings that target the best candidates.

Your use of the taxonomy is determined by the type of license you request. The full Terms and Conditions are available here.

The Lightcast Skills Taxonomy remains fully open and transparent (you can see every skill in the taxonomy here, read the full changelog here, and use our Skills Extractor to normalize and standardize skills from any job posting, resume, or syllabus you paste in). API access is now available on a contract basis.