A shared skill taxonomy isn't the end goal—it's the infrastructure that powers better, faster, and fairer talent decisions. The most successful organizations view skills as a means to transform how they manage talent, not just a new framework to implement. Our shared taxonomy provides the foundation that makes this transformation possible without the significant cost and delay of building from scratch – but the most important thing is for organizations to move toward using skills as the currency for evaluating candidates, rather than ill-fitting proxies like degree attainment or potentially biased heuristics.

The potential for this work doesn't end at the walls of a single company. A national skills-based talent ecosystem would transform how America develops and deploys its workforce. By establishing skills as the common language between employers, workers, and education providers, we could address the persistent mismatches that leave positions unfilled while qualified talent remains undiscovered. Organizations would define work through standardized skill requirements, education providers would align learning directly to market-demanded capabilities, and workers would navigate careers based on validated abilities rather than credentials alone.

A key step to making this vision achievable is through emerging Learning and Employment Records (LERs) and verified digital credentials that create trusted, portable skill profiles. While digital credentialing platforms exist today, realizing this ecosystem requires coordinated decisions around data standards, verification processes, and cross-employer recognition. As more organizations adopt shared taxonomies and support open credentialing standards, we move closer to a future where workers carry verified skill records that travel with them throughout their careers—eliminating information gaps and enabling skills-first hiring at scale.

This shared infrastructure would expand economic mobility while giving businesses unprecedented visibility into available talent. The business impact would be substantial. Companies could quickly identify transferable skills during economic shifts, strategic workforce planning would become capability-focused rather than role-based, and talent deployment would gain precision and agility. This evolution from our current proxy-based system to one where skills serve as the universal currency of opportunity would benefit everyone—reducing hiring costs and time-to-fill for employers, creating clearer advancement paths for workers, and building a more resilient, competitive national workforce.