Transforming Talent Strategy with Skill Profiles

We’re talking a lot about skills lately. From being called the currency of the future to the key to unlocking opportunities for more diverse workforces, emphasis on skills is important and here to stay. 

Labor market information brings context to your roles and their associated skills. 

Workforce skills are numerous and constantly changing. For a skill strategy to become a competitive advantage, you need to make sense of how skills fit into current and future roles. A skill without context is like a chapter without the whole story. To understand one skill, you need more skills attached in a skill profile. The kicker? Labor market information.

Let’s look at an example of why skills, and considering them with comprehensive labor market information attached, strengthens your overall job architecture and more specifically, your role skill profiles.

Defining your roles and job titles by skills:

Consider a growing global company with 350,000 employees. When looking closer at job titles, there are currently 4,000 people who have the title “Business Analyst,” and many of these people are working in vastly different functions throughout the organization. Since the company is expanding and hiring frequently, using generic job titles has been the easiest way to place someone into each job quickly. But with such a broad title for a specific role, how does the HR team really know what these people are doing on a daily basis? Is Business Analyst actually the right title, or should these employees be attached to more meaningful titles? We know every one of these 4,000 analysts doesn’t need their own job title, but we do know they could be further defined and refined. 

Skill profiles will help you reach a new standard in job architecture.

While a paragraph job description will more clearly define these roles and set them apart from one another, there is something more dynamic, measurable, and comparable—a skill profile. A skill profile provides granular detail beyond the job title, and even the job description. With a skill profile, you can immediately see what detailed skills are needed to do the job, infer what skills the employee has in that role, and benchmark against other roles in your company and roles in other companies.

So, how do you build a skill profile? 

The first step is normalizing the job title. This means translating it into the most relevant terminology across the job market. When the title is normalized, you can utilize external labor market insights to compare roles and benchmark them against your competitors, regions, or an industry. Instead of comparing apples to oranges, why not compare apples to apples?

Once you have the normalized title, it is time to check out the top skills associated with that title. How do these skills match up with your current role description? Are they similar? Different? Is there a skill you’re missing that will enhance the skill profile? By seeing the job title in the market, you get a comprehensive picture of what types of skills are in demand and how they are connected. For example, if industry leaders are requiring specific skills that you aren’t for the same role (based on the normalized title), you might consider including them to improve your job description. 

A normalized title allows you to pull the right skills from the marketplace to create your skill profile. Looking at skills in a labor market context, you understand which skills you are using well, which ones are most relevant, and what you might need to add to complete the skill profile. See what your competitors are doing, know trending skills in your industry, and pull skills from your current job descriptions to build out skill profiles. When these skills are connected to Lightcast’s open source skills library, they are meaningful.

By using the Lightcast language of skills, you can take your profiles to the next level. 

If you want to enhance your job descriptions and gain actionable context for your roles, Talent Transform is the solution. The tool allows you to integrate your own role data and connect it to the common language of the labor market. With the market constantly shifting and skills always changing, you need the most current labor market information tied to your internal systems. By integrating with your HRIS/HCM software, the data will always be up-to-date and accurate. Talent Transform utilizes our regularly updated (every two weeks to be exact!) open-source library of over 32,000 skills to provide the most comprehensive picture of skills available. 

Skills are the currency of the workforce. When you spend the same currency as the rest of the market, you are able to build skill profiles that bring context and meaning to your roles and job titles. Connecting your internal titles to the outside world broadens your lens of skills, enabling you to have the most accurate and informed job architecture possible. 

Discover a new standard in job architecture with Talent Transform.

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