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 Skills Taxonomy
The global standard in skills. Our library of 34,000+ 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.
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Information on Skills
What Are Skills?
Lightcast Skills
A Skills-Based Approach
Skills-Driven Hiring Toolkit
Among widespread talent scarcity, organizations are being called to shift their hiring strategies toward a skills-driven 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.
Emerging skills in AI jobs
From HR Skills…to HR Jobs
Tech for Non-Tech Workers
Transforming Training Worldwide
Skills Straight, No Chaser
Learning that Works for Everyone
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-Driven Hiring
A skills-driven 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.
[ Learn about skills-driven hiring ]
Why We Stand For Skills
The Shared Language of the Labor Market
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.
Our Open Skills library 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.
Explore our Skills Taxonomy
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.
[ Dive into the depths of skill categories ]