Purpose

This article guides organizations in creating and managing a dynamic skills taxonomy using Skills Design.

Audience

Talent admins, HRBPs, Talent leaders

Overview

Organizations without a pre-existing skills taxonomy often face challenges in developing one. Many solutions suffer from lacking enough initial data to create a relevant taxonomy. Eightfold's Skills Design overcomes this challenge by leveraging a rich understanding of skills and analyzing the talent pool to build a foundational skills taxonomy.

Some common starting points for customers in the skills taxonomy journey include:

• Little-to-no skill setup: no clearly defined skills taxonomy identified
• Partial skill setup: partial taxonomy identified across a few job functions or families
• Mature skill setup: skills taxonomy built across all job functions and might be outdated

Seed skills in Skills Design

Skills Design automatically seeds the skills taxonomy by analyzing employee data and candidate profiles. This initial seeding helps organizations start with a functional taxonomy without the need for manual effort.

• Default seeding: employee and candidate data is used to populate the initial skills taxonomy. Skills from courses, job requisitions, and roles are not included in the default seeding but appear as recommendations under New Skills.
• Employee skills: skills present in employee skill fields are used for seeding and resumes are used to extract skills automatically. Extracted skills are included in Skills Design. Eightfold’s matching algorithm understands adjacent skills from various fields, such as job titles and education history, even if not explicitly listed as skills.

How skills seeding works

Skills Design normalizes skills data from the talent pool, standardizing equivalent skills. For example, terms such as ‘HR Admin’ and ‘Human Resources Administration’ are combined into a single standardized skill. The platform currently maps over 60,000 standardized skills and is continuously updated. Any additional customer-specific skills beyond this will need to be manually added or imported.

Pre-requisites

There are no data (employee/role/position) prerequisites for Skills Design. Customers can use their own skills taxonomy to get started and get recommendations from Market Insights for updates.

Some data fields required for Skills Design to seed skills are listed below.

Employee data

Candidate data

Managing skills taxonomy

Once the initial seeding is complete, Skills Design allows you to manage your skills taxonomy by adding, editing, or organizing skills into categories and subcategories. Organizations can also import custom taxonomies to tailor the framework further.
To know more about managing skills, read Skills management.