API Technical Specs

Coverage Per Tier

Full means all skills have a translation and the coverage of synonyms is extensive.

High means all common skills have a translation and the most common synonyms are covered.

Basic means all common skills have a translation and the coverage of synonyms is lower than the other tiers.

Context validation is only applied for Tier 1 languages.

Definition of a Skill

Skills are defined broadly as any kind of capability, knowledge or behavior that contributes directly to professional performance.

Structure of the Skills Taxonomy

The taxonomy has three layers: categories, skills and synonyms/variations.

The categories layer represents the following distinction:

• Professional skills include professional activities, techniques, tools, as well as areas of knowledge and specializations.
• IT skills include programming languages as wel as software tooling.
• Soft skills include personality traits and behaviors relevant to professional performance.
• Languages are simply knowledge of individual languages.

The skills layer represents skill 'concepts', each of which has an ID and a translation in the supported languages (see the Translations section below for details). This layer is language-independent; it contains the skills themselves, not the various terms and phrases through which they are described.

The synonyms/variations layer contains the various terms and phrases that can be used to denote a skill in a given language. This layer is language-specific. Each skill is linked to one or more synonyms in each of the supported languages.

Concept Granularity and Concise Descriptions

The taxonomy is designed for usage in natural language processing software. It therefore contains concise skill descriptions (usually 1-3 words), which are likely to match skill descriptions in CVs and vacancies. For the same reason, the taxonomy contains skills with various levels of granularity (e.g. both Finance and Real Estate Finance). Skill descriptions are generally noun phrases, as treating all activities related to an area of expertise as separate skills would introduce too much granularity. So instead of distinguishing three separate skills for Running/Training/Tuning Machine Learning Models, there is just a single skill called Machine Learning. Similarly, to keep the descriptions concise, prefixes like Working with or Expertise in are omitted. So Working with Gas Pipelines simply becomes Gas Pipelines.

Translations

All skills have descriptions in Tier 1 languages, except those that represent country-specific certifications (US-only).

Taxonomy Updates

The taxonomy is updated four times per year: March, June, September and December. There might be patch releases in between, but these will only concern the synonym-level, so the structure of the taxonomy won't be affected.