Standardized skill profiles for 30 jobs core to America’s workforce
Having a shared language, or taxonomy, for skills can help employers across different businesses and industries. Some of the nation’s largest employers have worked together to create shared skills profiles for jobs representing over 35 million U.S. workers, and tactical implementation guides to help you use them.
Shared Skills Implementation Playbook
Across industries, employers are already using shared skill taxonomies to solve real talent challenges. We’ve created a guide that distills their lessons into clear steps for embedding skills in hiring, learning, and workforce planning—and building a stronger skills-first system over time.
Our Skill Profile Framework
Top Skills
What should employers be hiring for when looking for candidates in this role? What are employers hiring for today, and what terminology can be used to describe these skills in job ads and assessments? Our resources can show employers which skills are critical for a given role, based on real hiring activity in the market.
Prevailing Market Trends
In the hiring market for each job, what skills are increasingly sought after? What skills are falling out of use? And what do nationwide trends tell us about changes in demand for these skills? We use publicly-available data to show which skills are on the rise, and which are declining, across each of our roles.
Shared Skill Definitions
Logistics skills are different for a Warehouse Manager than they are for a Retail Salesperson—we've created clear definitions of how each skill is used in a role, for easier assessment and comparison.
Proficiency Standards
What does it mean to have basic, intermediate, or advanced proficiency in a given skill? Each employer may have different measures of proficiency—we've created simple standards that can be used to translate across different employers.
About the Skills-First Workforce Initiative
Promoting mobility for American workers
This effort comes as more employers embrace a skills-first approach to hiring that values workers’ full set of skills and experiences rather than focusing primarily on proxies like a college degree. This kind of approach can help widen talent pools at a time when unemployment is low yet there are more open jobs than unemployed workers.
This work is the result of a first-of-its-kind collaboration some of America's largest employers, led by the Burning Glass Institute and convened by Walmart, to align on a shared language for skills and to promote mobility for American workers. Participating firms co-created each skill taxonomy with the goal of cross-recognizing skills and learning across companies.
Contact
For questions, press inquiries, or to join future phases of this initiative, please contact us!