Open Skills
Lightcast Open Skills Library
The only skills library you need.
Overview
Lightcast defines a skill as any competency or attribute that an employer may use to distinguish one role from another, or similarly that a candidate may add to their resume to distinguish themselves from other candidates.
Lightcast Skills is a comprehensive taxonomy of over 33,000 skills collected from hundreds of millions of job postings, resumes, and online profiles.
The taxonomy is arranged into a 3-tier hierarchy, with many skills grouped into Categories and Subcategories. The broader group, Category, acts as a way to logically group the skills in the library by industry. They map roughly to the Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy Career Areas. The Subcategories group similar skills, specific to performing a particular aspect of a job or task. They enable easy viewing of related skills.
We include Common Skills (like communication or problem-solving), Specialized Skills (like Java or financial analysis), and Certifications and Licenses (like CompTIA Security+ or certified radiological nurse). Spoken Languages and Software skills are also included and distinguishable via filters. Please see more information on this here.
Most skills in the taxonomy have a Definition, which is generated by AI and curated by our in house taxonomists.
The Skills taxonomy is built by our in house taxonomists that continually conduct research evaluating outdated or emerging skills as well as take into account customer requests.
Skill Taxonomy Refreshes
Lightcast Skills are refreshed monthly, in this new skills are added, old skills may be removed, coding and terminology is changed as necessary.
Skills Coding
Each skill in the Lightcast Taxonomy has one display name, but our models also use aliases, acronyms, abbreviations, and historic names to extract skills. The process begins by segmenting and tokenizing job postings to remove extra characters (punctuation) and new lines. The model then scans the text for word sequences that indicate skills in the proper context. For example, when "AWS" appears, the surrounding context helps determine whether it refers to the "American Welding Society" or "Amazon Web Services." A confidence score is assigned, and accuracy thresholds ensure quality predictions are displayed.
Feedback and skills suggestions are welcome please email [email protected] Suggestions will be assessed by the Lightcast team.
For skills to be useful, everyone needs to understand what everyone else is saying.
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Access and plug in our skill library of over 32,000 skills. Each has a unique machine-readable identifier and has been identified in real-world job postings and profiles, refined by our human experts. All for free.
Updated 5 days ago