Lightcast's Analyst platform offers Career Pathways, a tool that provides a visual representation of the job ecosystem, mapping out how jobs are related to one another and identifying potential career paths and opportunities for advancement.
Occupations
Career Pathways utilizes skills data from job postings to connect workers with the most related job opportunities.
Users input a Focus Occupation, and the tool will display a map of related roles, highlighting how they correlate and the potential paths for career growth.
Users can then select a Comparison Occupation from the chart to explore a specific career path and skill gaps into that role.
Depending on what the user is interested in learning more about, exploring related job opportunities can help users identify:
Next-Step Jobs are jobs that workers can transition into from the focus occupation.
Example Use Case: A workforce agency is targeting specific job seekers to identify the necessary skills needed to advance their careers or employers to identify skill gaps within their workforce and develop training programs to address them.
Feeder Jobs are those roles from which workers transition into the focus occupation
Example Use Case: An employer is looking to fill a number of Business Development Specialist roles, and wants to expand their search from typical pathways; this tool will highlight alternative roles with strong skills adjacencies to the target occupation.
Transition Types
Lightcast categorizes four types of transitions between roles, for easy categorization and analysis of relationship between the Focus Occupation to the Comparison Occupation. The four categories are:
Advancement: Jobs that pay more AND are within the same occupation group as the focus occupation.
Lateral Advancement: Jobs that pay more BUT require transition to a new occupational group as opposed to the focus occupation.
Similar: Jobs that pay a comparable salary AND are within the same occupation group as the focus occupation.
Lateral Transition: Jobs that pay a comparable salary BUT require transition to a new occupation group as opposed to the focus occupation.
Occupations are also ranked using Relevance Scores, which are calculated based on how closely aligned the skills are between the focus occupation and the listed comparison occupations.
Skills
Transitional Skills
Between the selected focus and comparison occupations, users can identify Transitional Skills, which are the most crucial skills for moving from one occupation to the second. These are ranked by an Importance Score, which provides guidance on where a worker should focus their skill development in attempting to make the transition. For example, in the transition from Market Research Analyst to Marketing Manager, we see the importance of strategic skills:
Skill Gaps
Skill gaps compare the frequency of top skills between the focus occupation and the comparison occupation found within job postings. While these skills do not always represent the skills required to transition, they provide an overview of the different skills in demand between the two occupations.
Lightcast presents skill gaps for specialized skills, common skills, and software skills.
Overall, Career Pathways provides a comprehensive view of the job market and career paths, helping organizations make informed decisions about their career and workforce development strategies.