Skills England has launched a beta version of a long-awaited skills classification tool in a bid to map and provide common language for the skills system in the UK.
Last week, the Department for Work and Pensions’ executive agency published the UK Standard Skills Classification (SSC), a four-level hierarchy that reflects over 3,000 occupational skills and aims to support “more effective decision-making” in recruitment, training, career development, and labour market analysis.
Once fully rolled out FE colleges and providers will be able to analyse local job vacancy data to identify skill demands, and design or modify courses to address specific skill gaps identified in the tool.
The government proposed a skills classification tool over two years ago to help training providers to be “more efficient”.
In a research report published on Thursday, Skills England said the lack of a “unified” system for classifying skills made it “difficult” to communicate and analyse skill-related information across education and employment.
“The SSC seeks to address this gap by providing a coherent structure that accurately reflects the skills and knowledge required in the UK workforce,” the research report said.
The SSC has broken down the system into four levels, comprising 22 broad skill domains, such as making decisions, manufacturing and caring, split further into 106 skill areas, hundreds of skill groups and finally 3,343 occupational skills.
The components of the SSC skill domain are then linked to relevant qualifications, tens of thousands of tasks, nearly 5,000 knowledge concepts, and 13 transferrable “core skills”.
The framework directly maps to apprenticeship standards (via Skills England’s occupational standards), course subject codes (under HECoS), Ofqual-registered qualifications and standard occupational classification codes.
Illustrated above, the serving and caring skill domain offers several linked skill areas including providing personal care and support services. The tool (see below) will then showcase the most important transferrable skills (rated out of 100), a list of core skills proficiencies (rated out of 5) and related industrial sectors and qualifications available.
What’s next?
Skills England plans to update the tool next year “based on user feedback” and then revise every five years.
Officials will monitor and change the SSC to remain fit-for-purpose in three areas: emerging and evolving job occupations, new curriculum changes relating to skills development and tweaks to terminology.
They will also keep an eye on job vacancies data, employer forums and associations, public forums such as Stack Exchange and Discord, and patent filings to identify any possible changes to the SSC.
The classification tool was developed using AI text embedding and large language models, drawing together multiple datasets from the former Institute for Apprenticeships and Technical Education, the National Careers Service and also international frameworks such as O*NET, a free US tool developed to help people develop their careers.
However, Skills England warned that the AI tools are “not entirely reliable” after struggling with data tagging and inconsistent grammar.
The agency’s officials initially sought to validate the classification took against a large CV library, but it proved “prohibitively complex and expensive”.
Instead, the Department for Work and Pensions has initiated a pilot to evaluate the use of the SSC to generate standardised skills profiles from a sample of service user CVs.
“Data was requested from LinkedIn to supplement other inputs (especially for the knowledge concept library) but, unfortunately, they were unable to provide access to the level of data required,” the report added.
The beta interactive tool can be found here.
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