The Lightcast Approach to Skills
The labor market is changing fast, but that doesn't mean you can't stay ahead of the curve. Lightcast skills deliver the clarity you need to succeed.
Lightcast Open Skills Library
The labor market skill standard. Our free library of 33,000+ skills comes from real-world use cases, honed by in house experts, and updated monthly so you don’t have to create a list yourself or rely on one you can’t trust.
Explore Lightcast Skills
Why Skills Are So Vital
Skills-Based Hiring Toolkit
Among widespread talent scarcity, organizations are being called to shift their hiring strategies toward a skills-based approach across the talent management lifecycle. Through actionable steps, this toolkit demystifies the process and empowers you to hire workers with the right skills for the job. Get the tools you need to get started today.
Skills articles
Introducing the Lightcast Digital Skills Outlook 2024
February 21, 2024
Upskilling Versus Reskilling
July 12, 2024
Becoming a Skills-Based Organization
April 28, 2023
Skills AND Degrees
February 17, 2023
3 Steps to Skills-Led Workforce Planning
September 26, 2023
Skills Gap Analysis: Key Steps to Identify the Skills You Need
November 14, 2023
Defining the ROI of a Skills-Based Organization
May 17, 2023
How Lightcast Can Support your Local Skills Improvement Plan in the UK
September 5, 2023
Why Skillify?
January 17, 2023
Skills Navigator
Ready to harness the power of skills? Lightcast will help transform your business into a thriving skills-based organization.
Speed of Skill Change
Change in the labor market is often gauged through job transitions, and jobs created and lost. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Even if a job isn’t created or lost, it can still change. The average US job has seen one-third of its skills change from 2021 to 2024. See our breakdown of every occupation by its “Skill Disruption Index,” score on a scale of 0 to 100 and more in this Speed of Skill Change report.
Skills Mismatch Lightpaper
If a degree program doesn’t prepare graduates for careers related to their major, then something fundamental has gone wrong. A clearer understanding about which skills and majors make the clearest and best-aligned transitions from school to work can enable better decisions about how to best prepare students for the labor market and position education institutions for future success.
Skills-Based Hiring
A skills-based approach finds qualified candidates who may have been previously overlooked. When you assess candidates based on the specific skills a job requires rather than college degrees or years of experience, HR professionals open the door to even more talent.
Lightcast Skills Library
Give it a try! Search our library of skills for free. We've collected and categorized 33,000+ skills from hundreds of millions of job postings, resumes, and online profiles.
2024 Digital Skills Outlook
The digital revolution is affecting labour markets in profound ways, both in terms of specialised IT jobs where the constant emergence of new technologies guarantees change, and on a more general level, with most jobs now requiring competence in basic computer software. Although digital skills are clearly vital, there are often large gaps between the expectations of employers regarding digital skills and what they are finding in the labour market. The prerequisite to closing these digital skills gaps is to first understand what employers need. The Lightcast Digital Skills Outlook highlights key trends in the digital skills revolution across 15 global key labour markets.
Skills are the foundation.
If we talk about the labor market using anything but skills, we’re creating an unnecessary level of abstraction, and there’s no need for that. Discussing skills themselves allows everyone to say exactly what they mean, and ask for exactly what they want. This minimizes miscommunication, enabling a job market that works, with greater efficiency, for everyone.
At Lightcast, our decades of labor market expertise have convinced us to put skills at the center of everything we do—so that we can create a labor market that works for everyone. Our software and consulting solutions are powered by skills, and so are the internal taxonomies that regulate our billions of data points.
More importantly, we want everyone to speak the shared language of skills. That’s why we’re giving away our shared Open Skills library: our list of skills has been generated from real-world data, vetted by experts, and ready for you today, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
Skills level the playing field.
Everyone involved in the labor market, at every level, can put skills to use. Educators need a language that will show value to prospective students and employers, and individual workers need employer-friendly language that will communicate their value to businesses. At the same time, businesses need to know how to clearly express what they’re looking for, so they don’t miss out on hiring valuable talent, and regions need to understand how they compare to other communities and how to stay competitive. Skills enable all of this.
Skills are a shared language we all speak.
At every level of the labor market, clarity is crucial. Too often, jobseekers, employers, educators, and community leaders talk past each other, using unclear terminology that limits how much each side can understand the others. Skills are the solution, because they create a shared language that everyone can speak.
To fully comprehend your workforce, you need both an internal and external view of the skills they have and how those map to jobs.
European Skills Transformation Index
A data-driven view of the skills that are driving change in European labour markets.
Explore our Skills Library
At Lightcast, we collect millions of labor market data points every day. In order to make use of them, we need to recognize how they connect. Our taxonomies are how—generating actionable insight through connections.
