Lightcast delivers the universal standard for understanding Occupations, Titles, and Skills

At Lightcast, we collect millions of labor market data points every day. In order to make use of them, we need to recognize how they connect. Our pioneering, best-in-class taxonomies are how: by organizing skills, occupations, and jobs into an understandable system, to make that data accessible and useful.

Other systems for understanding the workforce are outdated or out of touch, but we understand the relationships between every occupation, title, and skill, even when they change, so we can deliver reliable answers—fast. We are not merely cataloging the current state of work; we are creating the definitive map of a workforce in constant motion. Organizations around the globe are using this map to align their workforce, their development, and their strategies to the reality of the international labor market.

DEFINED: An occupation describes the role a person performs, a title is what the individual's job is called (by employers or employees) and the skills are used to accomplish it.

Lightcast Skills Taxonomy

33,000+ Skills

Companies' HR departments need to understand which skills are present among their workforce. Educational institutions need to standardize and articulate what skills they teach students. Workforce developers need to know what skills local workers will need in the future. Wouldn't it be ideal for all of them—all of us—to be working from the same common language?

Creating your own list of skills from scratch is time-consuming and labor-intensive. Many of the taxonomies that do exist are incomplete, are only useful within the organization or system itself, and lag behind actual market movement. That's where the Lightcast comes in.

The Lightcast Skills Taxonomy delivers clarity by allowing everyone to speak the same language. With a shared vocabulary, we can enable every worker and every job to precisely identify and articulate the supply and demand they offer the labor market. This extensive library catalogs over 33,000 skills and is updated monthly, providing a standardized and universally understood language for describing and analyzing workforce capabilities.

Our understanding of skills comes directly from how they're actually used in the labor market. And it happens in real time: The Lightcast Skills Library is updated every month to reflect emerging skills requested in job postings—crucial for understanding new and fast-developing workforce trends like AI and the blockchain. Every new skill is recorded in our publicly-accessible changelog.

The Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy

1800+ Specialized Occupations

The Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy is the universal standard for understanding occupations across the globe, uses a proprietary classification system of four different levels: career areas | occupation groups | occupations | specialized occupations.

The LOT is derived from data gathered via real-world postings and profiles. It delves deeper into specifics compared to government systems, such as O*NET and SOC. And it undergoes annual updates, (unlike the government systems whose update cycle in many years) striking a balance between stability and usefulness for longitudinal comparisons, while also promptly capturing newly emerging roles as they formalize in the economy.

As we move up in the hierarchy, subsections are exclusive to their associated category. In other words, each specialized occupation is unique to its occupation, each occupation is unique to its occupation group, and each occupation group is unique to its career area. This prevents duplicate or overlapping data when analyzing more than one occupation.

Lightcast Titles

75,000+ Titles

Lightcast Titles are an important part of the infrastructure supporting the function of the skills and occupation taxonomies. From the millions of raw titles collected from postings and profiles, our modeling team refines them down into a more standardized and accessible number (currently near 75,000).

The relationship between titles, occupations, and skills is fluid. Many titles map directly to an occupation in the LOT, but not all: the title of "Air Traffic Controller" would correspond directly to the "Traffic Controller" occupation, but that relationship is not fixed in the way the four levels of the occupation taxonomy are fixed to one another.

Lightcast Titles allows organizations to create a consistent standard to organize their core jobs data, to create a connection to external labor market data, and connect to useful taxonomies like LOT and Lightcast Skills Taxonomy. It is a translation layer from what organizations call their jobs to useful external context so they can benchmark, compare, and analyze their data outside of their four walls. It creates universal meaning versus an inward-looking limited view.

The purpose of the Lightcast Titles Taxonomy is not to identify the skills associated with the occupation of fast food worker; the others are more effective in defining those relationships. Instead, the Titles taxonomy is used to recognize that a "sandwich artist" being hired at Subway is, for all intents and purposes associated with labor market data analysis, a fast food worker.

Clear classification means clear comparison, so that trends and insights are easily understood. The Lightcast Occupation Taxonomy (LOT), Titles Taxonomy, and the Lightcast Skills Taxonomy provide the essential structure and language necessary to translate raw, unorganized data into actionable and meaningful insights.