SkillsEngine

Last Updated: 03/08/2024

Relational Map coming soon. Learn more about the work we’re doing with AI and view our example prototypes here.

Overview

SkillsEngine is a technology innovation team based in Austin, Texas. The team builds data-driven solutions to connect the worlds of learning and work through a unified skills language. Its mission is “to drive positive economic impact and better opportunities for everyone, through a shared understanding of skills.”

SkillsEngine is backed by the nonprofit Center for Employability Outcomes (C4EO) at Texas State Technical College (TSTC), the state’s only public technical training institution.

The free tool, SkillsEngine, contains a digital library of skills—more than 20,000 skills needed for all current jobs as well as occupations that don’t yet exist. The system tracks a broad range of interpersonal and technical abilities. Related skills can be bundled into skill sets, and those sets can be arranged and rearranged to create skills profiles for jobs as varied as truck service technician and software developer.

The Profile Builder, powered by SkillsEngine, generates a custom competency profile based on thousands of quality skill statements across more than 1,100 occupations. This application uses the SkillsEngine Competencies API to demonstrate the capabilities of this service.

Examples of tasks that SkillsEngine can perform using its artificial intelligence-informed system include:

  • Transforming a typical job description or help-wanted ad to a new version translated into the language of skills. The federal government has used this to standardize its job descriptions and to help employees identify new roles that might match their talents.
  • Enabling a college to build a credential around the skills needed for particular occupations. A community college in Denver used SkillsEngine to create a cybersecurity degree program. Leaders in Minnesota used it to build training pathways for personal care assistants.
  • Help companies improve hiring, workers find better jobs and higher education institutions better train students for good careers.

Background

Supporters of skills-based hiring and education want jobs to be broken down into their smaller components so that information can be used to engineer new opportunities to connect people with employment. This work is needed to shift employers’ attention away from the college degree a job candidate may (or may not) hold and toward the skills that candidate can demonstrate. Moving to skills-based hiring would lower a barrier blocking many qualified people from good job opportunities.

SkillsEngine and efforts like it build on the earlier skills-first movement. For decades, industrial-organizational psychologists and other experts have been doing job and task analyses for the military and the federal government. One long-established repository of skills knowledge is the Occupational Information Network, or O*NET system. Housed in the U.S. Department of Labor, it has data about more than 900 occupations. Colleges use it for curriculum development and to help students explore careers. Employers use it to craft job descriptions, and workforce experts use it to help people who need new or better jobs find roles that match their skills. Even other countries use it. O*NET and other skills systems require that data about which skills are important for which jobs be compiled, sorted, and validated. This has traditionally required managers and workers to participate in extensive interviews, and/or send surveys to workplaces to collect data. Both methods are slow processes, creating gaps in timely information about the job market.

Technology has enabled a newer method to measure which job skills are in demand at any given moment: by scraping data from live online job postings. Critics note that this method can miss a lot of information. SkillsEngine’s approach is focused on blending the rigor of traditional research methods with the convenience of modern technology.

The team that created SkillsEngine is developing a skills profile for a particular occupation. To do this, it presents users with a simple quiz, asking them to rate a series of work activities on their perceived importance to the job. Ratings are made on a four-point scale: critical, important, beneficial, or irrelevant. After enough qualified reviewers complete the quiz, the system compiles the identified skills. The idea is to know which skills are “critical” or “important” instead of merely “beneficial.” This can help hiring managers and educators prioritize what to look for and what to teach.

SkillsEngine started as a way to help Texas State Technical College align its programs to employers’ needs. It later became a business-to-business product licensed to colleges, states, and credentialing organizations.

Partners

Texas State Technical College

Resources

https://www.edsurge.com/news/2022-10-06-inventing-a-job-skills-machine

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