Lightcast Taxonomies
When the right people have the right skills for the right jobs, then businesses, communities, educators, and individuals can all come together and create a job market that works for everyone. Understanding the labor market starts with knowing what those jobs and skills are.
The Universal Standard in Labor Market Intelligence
Lightcast sets the standard for understanding skills, occupations, and titles.
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 pioneering, best-in-class taxonomies are how: by organizing skills, occupations, and jobs into an understandable system, we make that data accessible and useful.
Other systems for understanding the workforce are outdated or out of touch, but we understand the relationships between every occupation, title, and skill, even when they change, so we can deliver reliable answers—fast. We are not merely cataloging the current state of work; we are creating the definitive map of a workforce in constant motion. Organizations around the globe are using this map to align their workforce, their development, and their strategies to the reality of the international labor market.
Skills, Occupations, and Titles, Defined
A skill is an ability or proficiency needed to accomplish work.
An occupation describes the role that a worker performs. (Several titles might map to the same occupation.)
A title is what an individual's job is called by themselves and their employer, and can be highly specific.
Lightcast Skills Taxonomy
34,000+ Skills
HR departments need to understand which skills are present among their workforce. Educational institutions need to standardize and articulate what skills they teach students. Workforce developers need to know what skills local workers will need in the future. Wouldn't it be ideal for all of everyone to work from the same common language?
Creating your own list of skills from scratch is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Many of the taxonomies that do exist are incomplete, are only useful within the organization or system itself, and lag behind actual market movement. That's where the Lightcast comes in.
The Lightcast Skills Taxonomy delivers clarity by allowing everyone to speak the same language. With a shared vocabulary, we can enable every worker and every job to precisely identify and articulate the supply and demand they offer the labor market. This extensive library catalogs over 34,000 skills and is updated monthly, providing a standardized and universally understood language for describing and analyzing workforce capabilities.
Our understanding of skills comes directly from how they're actually used in the labor market. And it happens in real time: the Lightcast Skills Library is updated every month to reflect emerging skills requested in job postings—crucial for understanding new and fast-developing workforce trends like AI. Every new skill is recorded in our publicly-accessible changelog.
But that’s just the beginning: what sets Lightcast apart is how human experts check and refine every skill in order to maintain the highest standard of accuracy and usefulness. This attention to detail, combined with the decades of experience Lightcast has in collecting and analyzing labor market data, make Lightcast the global leader in skills.
Over 6,000 organizations have already adopted Lightcast Skills as their standard for the international labor market.
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Skills are the Foundation.
Each of the over 34,000 skills in our taxonomy offers a map to the workforce future. Every skill has its own webpage, where you can see how each fits into a category, and browse examples of real job postings that feature that distinct skill.
Go Further with Skills
Using skills, employers and workers can find their best fits, while communities and educators can better equip the workforces of the future—by knowing exactly and clearly what a job requires and how to best meet those needs. Dive deeper into the Lightcast skills ecosystem.
Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy (LOT)
1800+ Specialized Occupations
The Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy is the universal standard for understanding occupations across the globe, uses a proprietary classification system of four different levels: career areas, occupation groups, occupations, and specialized occupations.
The LOT is derived from data gathered via real-world postings and profiles. It goes deeper into specifics than government systems, such as O*NET and SOC. And it undergoes annual updates, (unlike the government systems whose update cycle in many years) striking a balance between stability and usefulness for longitudinal comparisons, while also promptly capturing newly emerging roles as they formalize in the economy.
Subsections are exclusive to their associated category. In other words, each specialized occupation is unique to its occupation, each occupation is unique to its occupation group, and each occupation group is unique to its career area. This prevents duplicate or overlapping data when analyzing more than one occupation.
LOT's Hierarchical Structure: Four Levels of Granularity
(e.g. Healthcare, Finance, Transportation) are the broadest occupational category in the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy and generally map to different industries. They are designed to be useful in bringing together many similar occupations that are responsible for similar work tasks. Their overarching scope allows for a quick look at broad segments of the labor market. They provide an understanding of the defining skills that are necessary to enter any career within its scope.
(e.g. Physicians, Banking and Lending, Truck and Bus Drivers) are clusters of occupations that share very similar skill or role requirements. They describe the different “fields” or “disciplines” available in the market for early- or pre-career students. They are subsectors of career areas.
(e.g. Physician, Loan Officer, Tractor-Trailer Truck Driver) often overlap with actual job titles. They are designed to align easily with government taxonomies, undergraduate degree programs, and the career aspirations of workers entering a new industry for the first time.
(e.g. Surgeon, Mortgage Underwriter, Refrigerated Truck Driver) offer our most granular level of specificity, allowing for the closest look at supply and demand for a given role compared to the market, and also the clearest look at the skills required. They are characterized by unique and value-added sets of skills, roles, and responsibilities, as well as additional education or credentials beyond the minimum requirements of the entry-level role they may extend from.
Unparalleled Advantages
Comprehensive international coverage on every continent except Antarctica, providing a truly international perspective on the labor market.
Over 1,800 specialized occupations, offering 2-4 times the granularity of government taxonomies. Private competitors largely use those government taxonomies, suffering the same weaknesses, or simply input job titles, which are noisy and unreliable —when using only job titles, one might miss that a Proofreader and a Copy Editor do the same kind of work, or that a Project Manager in construction and a Project Manager in marketing do not.
Regular, agile updates, ensuring the taxonomy remains current with the evolving labor market, a stark contrast to the often decade-long update cycles of official taxonomies.
LOT Attributes: A Deep Dive
See The Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy in the Analyst Platform
With Talent Analyst, Developer, and Analyst for education, you can tap into the most comprehensive insight available on labor market trends, including salary data, locations, and context from traditional data sources.
Lightcast Titles
75,000+ Titles
Lightcast Titles are an important part of the infrastructure supporting the function of the skills and occupation taxonomies. From the millions of raw titles collected from postings and profiles, our modeling team refines them down into a more standardized and accessible number.
A title is the name a worker uses to describe their specific job. It might be broad, a common name (like "Security Officer") but not necessarily. A title might be more idiosyncratic, or even unique to that one person's job.
Titles Vs. Occupations
Titles are more unique and specific than occupations. Occupations are more useful for most labor market analysis.
Players in the NBA have specific job titles that correspond to their position—point guard, power forward, and so on. The Lightcast Titles Taxonomy would refine those into something a little more common: "Basketball Player." But if you're trying to understand labor market trends, you need an even larger sample, so LOT would refine it further. LeBron James' occupation is "Athlete / Sports Competitor."
Or to use a more practical example, the restaurant chain Subway calls its workers "Sandwich Artists." That's their title, as set by their employer (and there are enough of them to warrant a place in the taxonomy). But their occupation is "Fast Food Worker."
Many titles map directly to an occupation in the LOT, but not all. If you're an "Account Executive," your title matches your occupation exactly. But if your employee ID badge says "Security Guard," your title is slightly different than your occupation, which is "Security Officer."
Putting Titles To Work
Lightcast Titles allows organizations to create a consistent standard to organize their core jobs data, to create a connection to external labor market data, and connect to useful taxonomies like LOT and Lightcast Skills Taxonomy. It is a translation layer from what organizations call their jobs to useful external context so they can benchmark, compare, and analyze their data outside of their four walls. It creates universal meaning versus an inward-looking limited view.
The Lightcast Titles Taxonomy has over 75,000 entries, becuase it's designed to accurately describe the labor market. The Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy has fewer than 2,000 entries, because it's designed to provide useful insights and inform decision-making.
Using a standardized, structured classification of job titles enables professionals to make accurate comparisons, facilitate integration with other systems and HR software, support better benchmarking and workforce planning, and compare programs across regions.
Clear classification enables clear comparison. The Lightcast Skills, Occupations, and Titles taxonomies provide the essential structure and language necessary to translate raw, unorganized data into actionable and meaningful insights.
Go Deeper Into The Data
Lightcast taxonomies exist so that businesses, public sector leaders, and education institutions can make better labor market decisions. Whatever your question—whether you want to dive deeper into the data or you want to see what our taxonomies can help accomplish in your organization—we're here to help.