What is a Skills Taxonomy?

At Purepost we are frequently discussing skills taxonomies, but what are they, and why do employers need them to achieve skills-based hiring?

Essentially, a skills taxonomy helps everyone stay on the same page when discussing what skills are necessary to perform a specific role. By clearly defining, categorizing and organizing the skills an organization needs, Talent Managers make it much easier to determine exactly what skills they should base their hiring on. 

Creating a skills taxonomy is an exhausting process for large or small organizations, often not done as it takes a great deal of labor. But with Purepost, determining your organization’s needed skills is quite simple. 

Purepost has already created, verified and normalized a skills taxonomy that encompasses the entire range of military and civilian roles. Since we have already created a master skills taxonomy, it is easy for us to normalize any other organization’s job descriptions into a common vocabulary for a skills taxonomy. 

A skills taxonomy is a structured framework that categorizes and organizes skills into a hierarchical system. The best known taxonomies are those that we use to organize the natural world, organizing life forms into plants, fungi, animals or insects, and determining exactly how a particular plant relates to all the others. A skills taxonomy does this same sort of naming and ordering, but for the skills used by employees. Skills include technical skills, interpersonal skills, self-regulation skills, and management skills.

A skills taxonomy starts by getting things organized:

Classification:

• Skills are grouped into categories and subcategories based on their nature and relevance.
• Categories may include technical skills, soft skills, management skills, etc.

Standardization:

• Provides a common language and standard definitions for skills.
• Helps ensure consistency in how skills are described and understood across an organization or industry.

Hierarchy:

• Skills are often organized in a hierarchical manner from broad to specific.
• Top-level categories might include broader skill sets, which are then broken down into more detailed and specific skills.

Relevance:

• Aligns skills with job roles, career paths, and industry requirements.
• Facilitates matching of skills to specific tasks or responsibilities.

Competency Levels:

• May include proficiency levels, indicating the depth of expertise or mastery required for each skill.
• Levels might range from beginner to expert.

Skills Taxonomies are most often used by the HR function within employer organizations, but they can also be useful for Educational or Training institutions who want to be sure they are preparing their students in the skills most necessary. 

Applications:

• Recruitment and Hiring: Helps in defining job requirements and identifying suitable candidates.
• Training and Development: Guides employee training programs and career development plans.
• Performance Management: Assists in evaluating employee performance based on relevant skills.
• Workforce Planning: Aids in identifying skill gaps and planning for future workforce needs.
• Educational Programs: Aligns academic curricula with industry skill requirements.

Traditionally, each organization has had to build its own skills taxonomy. There aren’t many available off-the-shelf that are easy to fit to the idiosyncratic roles and responsibilities of a given organization. To be truly useful, though, the organization must customize the skills taxonomy, ensuring that all of their roles are clearly mapped to the defined skills, and none are missing. 

As technological advances come to the HR vertical, skills taxonomies are more available than ever, but the work of normalizing all of the roles in an organization is often left only partially done, or erroneously done with AI, and never checked for accuracy. However, within the Purepost database, normalizing an enormous organization’s job descriptions to our skills taxonomy is facilitated by our having already mapped all of the skills in the military and civilian employment world. 

Once the skills required are defined for a particular role, it becomes much easier to hire based on skills. Skills-based-hiring becomes not just a tantalizing dream, but an achievable reality.

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