Why do we need a skills framework?

The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has triggered an economic recession, increased unemployment and caused a record number of redundancies. With the hospitality, retail, arts and entertainment sectors being hit especially hard, the challenge for displaced workers to find new job opportunities in a time of crisis is further compounded by the acceleration of automation in many industries.

Now more than ever, we need the tools and guidance to respond to a rapidly shifting labour market. Jobseekers need to identify feasible employment options that utilise their knowledge and abilities, and employers need to recognise the transferable skills of applicants who may be transitioning from other sectors. Following the Government’s recent announcement of a Restart scheme (£2.9 billion to support over one million unemployed people), policymakers will need to identify the most promising opportunities for reskilling and upskilling of the workforce. In turn, this demands an in-depth understanding of the skills and competencies needed in different jobs, and the relationships between these skills. A framework of skills can help by providing a common language for frictionless communication between workers, employers, educators and learners.

What is a skills framework?

Skills frameworks describe the skills, knowledge and competencies required in different jobs. Several such frameworks already exist, including O*Net which was developed by the U.S. Department of Labour and ESCO which was created by the European Commission.

SSG, in their mission to provide the citizens of Singapore with the opportunities to develop their fullest potential throughout life, has collaborated with industry experts to design over 30 frameworks for strategically important sectors, detailing their job roles, skills and tasks. These experts have meticulously recorded the knowledge and abilities underlying the skills and competencies required for each role, as well as the key tasks involved in each job’s critical work functions. In total, Singapore's Skills Frameworks document approximately 51,000 abilities and 55,000 knowledge types, underpinning more than 8,000 unique technical skills, and 21,000 key tasks.

What can you do with a skills framework?

It is not enough to build a skills framework - we also need to build tools around the framework to bring value to individuals and organisations. Through our collaboration with SSG, we developed several use cases demonstrating how data science and machine learning approaches can be used to combine SSG’s sectoral frameworks and in turn uncover pathways between job roles across different sectors, characterise the skills gaps in job transitions, and reveal relationships between skills and competencies.

1. Supporting career transitions

The most important use case for a framework is supporting workers as they move between jobs. We can do this by leveraging natural language processing - a machine learning method - to examine the similarities and differences between the knowledge and abilities required by each job, and the tasks performed by the workers. This allows us to measure the similarity between any two jobs, in order to find alternative career pathways with minimal skill gaps.

The tool below illustrates that capability. For a given job in a particular sector, the tool shows ten other roles that require similar skills (five of these roles are within the selected sector and five are outside of that sector). This tool allows users to uncover novel and unexpected cross-sectoral job transitions. Not only is this helpful to workers, particularly in times like these, but also to employers - it might help them to broaden the applicants that they consider. Moreover, for career advisors such an approach may help to provide advice and support to workers.

The similarity of skills is not the only consideration when moving jobs, but it is an important aspect that, without a skills framework, is difficult to measure. Once a framework is in place, it can then be enriched with other types of labour market information. For each suggested job role, the tool also provides an estimate of the monthly salary for the role and its level of seniority. This could help workers to identify their ‘desirable transitions’ - those jobs that not only require similar skills to their current role, but crucially offer a higher salary (or are at a more senior level).

Enter your job title into the search box below to find your viable job transitions.

2. Finding gaps in career ladders

SSG has also developed detailed maps of career pathways delineating typical vertical transitions (promotions) and lateral moves between different tracks within each sector. By assessing the similarity between any two job roles - and hence also the skill gaps - we are able to measure and compare, across different sectors, the potential challenges of climbing the career ladder and switching between career tracks.

We found that the origin and destination jobs of an average vertical transition share slightly more than half of their knowledge and abilities (58% job similarity) whereas lateral transitions are a little less challenging, and share about two-thirds of their knowledge and abilities (64% similarity). These, however, are only averages and further insights can be obtained by looking at individual sectors.

We identified the training and adult education sector as being particularly challenging for vertical progression, with job roles sharing only about one-third of the required competencies. Conversely, workers making side moves could satisfy more than half of the knowledge and ability requirements at the destination job. Therefore, while it may be feasible to explore different job tracks and make career adjustments, workers in this sector might struggle to make the jump to managerial positions, and hence there might exist a particular need for additional training and mentoring support.

In contrast, in sectors like accountancy, social service and healthcare the opposite is true, with lateral moves being significantly more challenging than promotions. This suggests that these sectors have more constrained career tracks associated with specialised knowledge and abilities. For example, the accountancy sector features numerous distinct career tracks such as business valuation, tax, audit, and assurance. Without feasible lateral paths, workers in such roles will have less flexibility and may find themselves either stuck, or even vulnerable, for example, in cases of organisational restructuring.

We then used the same approach to measure the difficulty of cross-sectoral transitions. Workers in jobs that share little knowledge and abilities with roles in other sectors may struggle to adapt to labour market shocks and sector-wide downturns, such as those caused by the ongoing coronavirus pandemic.

We found job roles in the media sector (such as camera operators and sound engineers) to be among the most specialised, and hence the most isolated from other sectors. The few exceptions in this sector were the more managerial roles, such as marketing directors and product managers, who tend to have more transferable skills which can be applied across different sectors. This observation echoes our findings for European occupations and emphasises the importance of supporting the creative sectors in particular, during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Conversely job roles in food manufacturing, retail and engineering services were among the most well-connected to other sectors. For example, assistant engineers in the food manufacturing sector and marketing managers in retail were among the jobs with the best cross-sectoral transition prospects. The latter may transition to numerous similar roles related to marketing in tourism, hotel and accommodation, financial services and even food manufacturing sectors. Of course, the real-world feasibility and desirability of these transitions will be affected by a host of additional factors such as the state of the local labour market, expected compensation levels and accessibility of retraining opportunities.

These insights could be used by policymakers for gauging the vulnerability of jobs to sector-wide shocks, and for targeting broader upskilling efforts to build worker resilience. Strikingly, even within a single sector we found a large variation in the transition prospects for different roles. This underscores the real value of a skills framework - to enable highly tailored guidance and support for each worker and transition pathway.

3. Measuring skill transferability

Transferable skills are skills that can be applied across various jobs and industries, and as such, they can be particularly important when a jobseeker doesn’t have specific industry experience. Lists of transferable skills usually include several soft skills, such as creativity, communication, leadership and time management, among others.

A skills framework provides a more rigorous and nuanced way of measuring skill transferability that is not limited to soft skills. We can go beyond labelling skills as ‘transferable’ or ‘not transferable’, and instead embrace the fact that transferability is a continuum rather than a discrete category.

By using an unsupervised machine learning approach called clustering, and techniques from network science, we organised over 8,000 skills and competencies into categories of closely related skills and measured two aspects of their transferability.

Firstly, we ascertained the number of sectors in which a particular group of skills is used. Possessing skills that are widely-applied will help workers to transition between different sectors. Among such skills, we found examples that are perhaps less commonly listed as transferable, including vendor management, risk management and innovation management.

Secondly, it is possible to assess skills’ interconnectedness with other skills, based on the similarity of their underlying knowledge and abilities (owing to the detailed nature of the SkillsFuture skills frameworks). This allowed us to distinguish between core competencies, such as business management and stakeholder management, and other skills that, while still being widely applied, use more specialised knowledge and abilities such as negotiation, emergency management and engineering.

Identifying highly interconnected skills may help workers to identify their core competencies and may help learners to choose between different types of retraining and upskilling. For example, stakeholder management skills are connected to other communication competencies such as talent management and learning and development, as well as skills related to business operations, such as change management and core business management.

What else can you do with a skills framework?

The section above illustrates just a handful of applications for a skills framework. By enriching the framework with real-time data on job vacancies, it would be possible to track changes in regional skills demand, evaluate the market value of different skills and competencies, and identify the emergence of new skills.

By incorporating the latest insights on advances in task automation, we can support workers at risk of being displaced by automation, to make transitions towards more secure employment. Similarly, to tackle the economic downturn, workers displaced by COVID-19 could be supported by tailored reskilling and career guidance.

Importantly, if the same skills framework were to be used by training providers and universities, it would enable a greatly-improved mapping of regional skills supply and identification of skills mismatches.

We are building the UK’s first data-informed skills framework

Detailed occupational and skills frameworks can ultimately provide a more holistic view of pathways between different jobs. Having a “map” of the landscape of jobs and skills will be essential for efficiently responding to labour market disruptions, especially at a time when the UK faces an economic downturn and needs to “level up” and redeploy its workforce.

The challenge is that skills frameworks should be as inclusive and timely as possible, but developing and updating expert-designed frameworks is an extremely slow and labour-intensive process. To explore an automated approach, Nesta released the first open, data-driven UK skills taxonomy in 2018 by using millions of online job adverts. However, we recognise that not all jobs are advertised online and not all necessary skills are mentioned within job adverts. To avoid these pitfalls, in the next version of the skills taxonomy, we are combining the timeliness and localisation of job adverts with the breadth of an already existing expert framework (ESCO), to ultimately arrive at a more inclusive and fully open-source skills framework.

Our manifesto on the future of work called on the Government to adopt a live skills taxonomy, which would identify the skills needed for different jobs. As we now repeat this call, the use cases shown here, as well as our project on mapping career causeways, demonstrate the potential value in building such a taxonomy and helping workers to navigate an increasingly uncertain labour market.

For more details about the particular skills frameworks, please contact SkillsFuture Singapore.

The methodologies for comparing occupational skills sets, finding data-driven hierarchies of related skills or jobs, and identifying core competencies have been developed further and described in the recently published report on Mapping Career Causeways: Supporting Workers at Risk.