The skills taxonomy identified over 140 clusters of specific skills. We’ve also shown that our methodologies can be used to create further skill taxonomies which provide even more detailed and refined pictures of skills demand. Our skills taxonomy is a first step towards a real-time map that links skills, occupations and qualifications.
The taxonomy provides estimates of the demand for each skill cluster, based on the number of mentions within adverts. Users can search the taxonomy by job title and discover the skills needed for a wide range of jobs. We found that the five clusters containing the most frequently demanded skills are social work and caregiving, general sales, software development, office administration, and driving and automotive maintenance. Around 60 per cent of job adverts mention a salary. This information can be used to provide estimates of skill values for the UK. The five skill clusters with the highest median annual salaries are data engineering, securities trading, IT security operations, IT security standards and mainframe programming. To date, workers and students have had to decide between these skills without access to this information. Skills that attract high annual salaries and for which demand has been growing include data engineering, IT security implementation, IT security operations, marketing research, app development and web development. This may reflect a shortage of workers who have these relatively new skills.