Skills

Definition

A broadly used concept referring to a requirement to carry out a specific job.

definition needs reviewing

Presently, skills in the Taxonomy are vaguely defined and lack the structure necessary to adequately categorize them. A skill in the Taxonomy can be a number of things. For instance, it can come in the form of a formal qualification (such as a diploma), a technology (such as Bluetooth) a software (such as Ms Excel), or formalized prerequisites to carry out a specific job such as licences and certificates, among other things.

A skill is generally expressed using a single term, but can it also be complemented with another term following a comma with the intention of narrowing or specifying its scope (see, for instance, Grafikprogram, undervisning). Other variants of expressing skills within the Taxonomy also exist. Notably they do not follow any formalised pattern such as the descriptive statements of learning outcomes.

The skill tree consists of two levels of concepts, in which concepts on the more detailed level are attributed with the type skill, each with a broader relation to a skill-headline concept:

graph TD;

B --narrower--> A
    A("skill-headline")
    B("skill");

Furthermore, skills are generally related to one or more SSYK level 4 groups. These connections should be seen as suggestions on skills that could be combined with occupation-name concepts within the group, without declaring their importance for them (for instance the strength of the relationship). Skills belonging to Yrkesövergripande kompetenser however are not related to any SSYK level 4 groups, since they are intended to be applicable in all of them.

Note that work is being done to connect skills to occupation-name concepts as well.

Skills within the taxonomy are not connected to the skills or traits listed in jobad-enrichment's synonym dictionary.

Below is an exhaustive look at how the Taxonomy skills relate to other concept types:

graph LR;

B --broader--> A
B --exact-match--> C
B --narrow-match--> C
B --broad-match--> C
B --close-match--> C
B --related --> E
B --related-->D
    A("skill-headline")
    B("skill"); 
    C("esco-skill")
    D("ssyk-level-4")
    E("skill-collection")

Connections to ESCO

According to the EURES regulation, each memberstate within the union is tasked to map its national classifications of skills and occupations to ESCO. In the Taxonomy, each mapping is represented as one of the following relations (also, see graph above):

Some skills, however, are not mapped but are instead tagged with the attribute no-esco-relation, meaning no relation to any concept in the external classification could be found. For instance, the skill Villkorad läkemedelsanvändning:

{
    "id": "RBpz_aSt_vhm",
    "preferred_label": "Villkorad läkemedelsanvändning",
    "type": "skill",
    "no_esco_relation": true,
    "uri": "http://data.jobtechdev.se/taxonomy/concept/RBpz_aSt_vhm"
}

Visit the chapter ESCO-skills for more information.

A note on skills in job ads

In job ads, Taxonomy skills are accepted but used very sparsely. This is due to a lack of support for skills in the service providing an integrated solution for recruiters to send their ads to Arbetsförmedlingen. This solution answers for the vast majority of ads.

Notes on the future of skills in the Taxonomy

Please note that:

the skill structure is subject to change in the future
work is being done to connect skills to occupation-name concepts

As of now, no timeframe has been established for carrying out the changes listed above.

GraphQL examples

The queries below can be tested through our GraphiQL interface.

Get skill structure

query MyQuery {
  concepts(type: "skill-headline") {
    id
    preferred_label
    type
    narrower(type: "skill") {
      id
      preferred_label
      type
    }
  }
}

query MyQuery {
  concepts(type: "ssyk-level-4") {
    id
    preferred_label
    type
    ssyk_code_2012
    related(type: "skill") {
      id
      preferred_label
      type
    }
  }
}

Get skill mappings to ESCO

query MyQuery {
  concepts(type: "skill") {
    id
    preferred_label
    type
    no_esco_relation
    exact_match(type: "esco-skill") {
      id
      preferred_label
      type
      esco_uri
    }
    broad_match(type: "esco-skill") {
      id
      preferred_label
      type
      esco_uri
    }
    narrow_match(type: "esco-skill") {
      id
      preferred_label
      type
      esco_uri
    }
    close_match(type: "esco-skill") {
      id
      preferred_label
      type
      esco_uri
    }
  }
}

JobTech Taxonomy API