Skillify Your Portfolio
Align Your Courses to Employer Skills Needs in 3 Steps with Lightcast's Skillabi Platform.
Incorporating In-Demand Skills in Your Courses
There are many reasons why you need to ensure your courses are teaching your students the skills that their future employers are looking for. From meeting requirements set out by the Office for Students, to achieving good rankings; from aligning with Government priority sectors, to simply wanting to ensure your students are highly employable. But how can you actually achieve this?
This huge challenge requires three things that most universities simply don't have: an in-depth understanding of the skills employers are looking for; the ability to assess courses against this; and the time and resources to do it all! This is where Lightcast's Skillabi platform comes in. Using our unparalleled Labour Market Insights, expert course-to-occupations mappings, and world-leading library of over 33,000 skills terms, you can use Skillabi to meet these challenges in three simple steps. Check out our 3-Step guide below, and begin your Skillabi journey to aligning the skills you teach with the skills employers need.
Evaluate your current programmes for the skills they teach using Skillabi.
Identify the occupations most closely associated with your courses using Skillabi.
Enhance your courses by adding in-demand skills identified by Skillabi.
STEP 1: Evaluate your current programmes for the skills they teach using Skillabi.
Within your portfolio, you are teaching a wealth of skills that are relevant to your students' future careers. But can you name all these skills? If not, you are not alone. The universities we work with across the world have the same issue, which isn’t surprising since identifying skills that relate to the labour market isn't what they're set up to do.
But it is what we are set up to do. Using our comprehensive, up-to-date Skills Library of over 33,000 real-world skills, we've built a tool - Skillabi - which enables us to input your course descriptions, and identify every single one of the workforce skills they teach. In the example below, we’ve used Skillabi to identify the skills taught in a Marketing and Digital Strategy degree, categorised into Skills Categories, Skills Sub-Categories, and finally the Specific Workforce Skills being taught. Click on the interactive chart to delve deeper into the detail, then imagine having these insights for all of the courses in your portfolio!
STEP 2: Identify the occupations most closely associated with your courses using Skillabi.
It’s one thing knowing which skills you are teaching that relate to the labour market, another to know which roles these skills most closely map to in the labour market. Whilst this is something most universities will have some idea about, it is not something that they will necessarily have comprehensive answers on.
Again, this is where it starts with Lightcast. With more than two decades’ experience mapping university courses to labour markets, we can give you a full picture of the real-world occupations that relate to your courses. The example below again looks at a Marketing and Digital Strategy degree, this time using Skillabi to identify the occupations that align most closely with the skills being taught. Hover over the links to see the “Programme-to-Occupation” alignment score, showing how well each role aligns to the skills taught in the degree on a scale of 1-100. Again, imagine having these insights for your entire course portfolio!
STEP 3: Enhance your courses by adding in-demand skills identified by Skillabi.
Steps 1 and 2 will give you a list of the skills in your course description, along with the skills-alignment of the course to relevant occupations. However, as the Programme-to-Occupation alignment scores in Step 2 showed, even the most aligned occupations are not wholly aligned and there is room for improvement.
Again, this is where Skillabi comes in, this time by identifying the skills gaps between your courses and related occupations. In the example below, we’ve used Skillabi to identify the top 10 skills that are not currently taught in the Marketing and Digital Strategy degree which, if incorporated, would improve alignment with one of the occupations we identified in Step 2: Digital Marketing Specialist. Adding Social Engine Optimization, for instance, would improve programme-to-occupation alignment by 9%. Imagine how much you could enhance the employability of your students by using Skillabi to identify and then close these skills gaps.
