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.
Skill Taxonomy Updates
Lightcast Skills are updated monthly. Updates are based on customer requests, internal research, and emerging skills from the market. New skills are added, old ones may be removed, and terminology is updated 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 Suggest it here. Suggestions will be assessed by the Lightcast team.