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The Careers Explorer logo. Two parallel stacks of orange gradient rectangles representing the movement from one skilled career onto several career opportunities.

The essential skills required to do any job

The Careers Explorer can be used by companies to inform their hiring decisions, by researchers to study the relationship between skills and the economy and by individuals to explore which skills best suit their chosen career path.

You are permitted to use this data in your product, as it’s available under creative commons licence.

Informing your hiring decisions

Use the essential skills profile for a job, or set of jobs, to inform job descriptions, candidate selection, and professional development journeys. 

The Skills Builder Career Explorer complements assessment on Skills Builder Benchmark and the development resources offered on Skills Builder Launchpad, helping you align all aspects of HR and talent development more closely to the Universal Framework for essential skills.

A pattern of brightly coloured circles representing a simplified skills distribution.
A scatter plot graph showing the Average wage for 4 digit SOC codes vs essential skill score.

For research

Use essential skills data in conjunction with labour market data to explore relationships between the economy and skills in novel ways. 

You can download versions of the data denominated in SOC2020, SOC2020 Extended, and SOC2010.

Building into your product

This data is licensed under a Creative Commons licence, which means you are free to use it in your own products and services. 

You can easily include essential skills data alongside your existing content, if your product already uses jobs data, whether that is denominated in SOC2020 or SOC2010.

An illustration showing the progression from one career into many others. Each career is represented with a card showing each career's SOC code and three coloured dots representing the three most important skills needed for that role.

How we developed the Careers Explorer

We re-analysed existing research into the skills required for specific jobs and combined it with a computational analysis of job descriptions. 

At various stages of the process we used natural language processing, multiple linear regression, and neural networks, in combination with over a decade of experience in essential skills. 

You can read more about the process, challenges, and the future of this work in the technical report.

We are grateful to the Gatsby Foundation for funding this work so that it can be made freely available to all.

Get in touch

Any questions about the data, or how you can use it? Whether you’re starting from scratch, or are already using the Skills Builder Universal Framework, we’d love to hear from you.

Get in touch

Licence

The content of the Skills Builder Career Explorer is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. You are free to copy or adapt the information posted here, as long as you credit this website and Skills Builder Partnership as the original source, and indicate where any changes were made to the original.

The Skills Builder Career Explorer is built in part with information from O*NET OnLine by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). Used under the CC BY 4.0 licence. O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. Skills Builder Partnership has modified all or some of this information. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.