Skills taxonomy
One governed vocabulary, and a bar most skills never clear.
337,470 skills collected; 8,159 governed. Only the governed ones appear on a partner dashboard or in a report, because a skill nobody has checked is not evidence.
- 1Knowledge142,023
- 2Technical98,549
- 3Competencies84,228
- 4Credential12,670
1,419 verified by a person · 6,740 vouched for by the market
01How a skill earns trust
Every skill sits in one of three states, and the label never softens.
These are the platform's own definitions, not marketing paraphrase.
Two skills in every hundred we hold are cleared to appear on a partner dashboard. The rest are infrastructure.
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1,419
Verified Checked by a person
Read, categorised and signed off individually
Our hand-curated core vocabulary. This is the layer everything else is measured against.
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6,740
Validated The job market vouched for it
Named in 25+ postings by 8+ employers, as one clean concept
Nobody read it. It cleared the bar instead.
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318,872
Unverified Collected, not yet trusted
No bar cleared
Kept for coverage and matching. Never shown to a partner, never counted in a report, never used to support a claim.
8,159 skills. Those are the only ones that appear on partner dashboards and in reports. Everything else is infrastructure. If a competitor quotes you a taxonomy of three hundred thousand skills, the question to ask is how many of them a human has ever looked at - and what happens to the rest.
02Why a flat list fails
A tool, a subject and a behaviour are not the same thing.
Those three are not taught or assessed the same way, so the model separates them at L1 and again at L2.
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TechnicalTools, technologies, methods98,54929%
Python, SQL, .NET, cloud platforms, laboratory technique. Things with a version number and a half-life.
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KnowledgeDomains and subject matter142,02342%
The largest category by some distance - what a person needs to know rather than what they need to operate.
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CompetenciesBehaviours at work84,22825%
Communication, stakeholder management, problem solving. Employers ask for these constantly and specify them badly.
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CredentialCertifications and licences12,6704%
The smallest category and the most binary: an employer either requires it or does not.
Every collected skill carries exactly one category. The four add up to 337,470 - the whole taxonomy, governed and not.
03The bar, and who clears it
Why 646 skills are queued, and most will not make it.
Clearing the statistical bar makes a skill a candidate. It does not make it governed.
| Test | Rule | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Posting spread | Named in 25 or more different postings | Repetition inside one description proves nothing |
| Employer spread | Named by 8 or more different employers | 25 mentions from one company is that company's internal vocabulary |
| Clean concept | Resolves to a single idea, not a phrase | "Strong communication and stakeholder skills" is two skills and an adjective |
| Length | Names over 40 characters are rejected | Almost always a sentence fragment that lost its verb |
| Compounds | Compound phrases are rejected | They double-count against both of their parts |
| Human confirmation | A reviewer promotes or ignores | Statistics propose. People decide. |
Actual promotions will be fewer, because compound phrases and over-length names are rejected at review. We publish the honest ratio rather than the flattering one: the gap between what qualifies and what ships is the whole point of having a reviewer.
04The uncomfortable finding
The most-demanded skill in 345,595 postings is not technical.
Ranked by how many postings name them. Read it as a curriculum brief, not a league table.
| Skill | Postings | Category |
|---|---|---|
| Communication | 142,767 | Competency |
| Problem solving | 59,919 | Competency |
| Stakeholder management | 36,235 | Competency |
| Collaboration | 32,216 | Competency |
| Attention to detail | 30,718 | Competency |
| Python | 26,777 | Technical |
| Project management | 22,900 | Competency |
| Data analysis | 22,174 | Technical |
| Negotiation | 21,633 | Competency |
| SQL | 18,602 | Technical |
Nine of the ten most-requested skills in the corpus are competencies, not tools. Most curriculum reviews spend their time on the tools, because tools are easy to add to a syllabus and easy to assess. The evidence says the shortfall your graduates are actually judged on sits in the other column.
Explore Nexus
Five capabilities, one evidence base.
Each one is a different question about the same corpus. They share a vocabulary, so a finding in one holds up inside another.
05Before you ask
What deans ask about the taxonomy.
Why show only 8,159 skills when you have collected 337,470?
Because the other 318,872 have not earned it. They are raw strings lifted from job descriptions - misspellings, sentence fragments, three phrasings of the same idea, one employer's internal jargon. They are kept because they help the engine recognise a phrase it has met before. Publishing them would inflate every number on your dashboard and make none of them checkable.
What exactly is the bar for promotion?
A skill is validated when it has been named in 25 or more different postings by 8 or more different employers, as one clean concept. Both halves matter: 25 postings from one employer is that employer's vocabulary, not the market's. Compound phrases and names longer than 40 characters are rejected outright - they are almost always a sentence that lost its verb.
Who verifies the verified skills?
Our taxonomy team, by hand. 1,419 skills form the curated core: someone read each one, placed it in the four-category model, and signed off on what it means. Validated skills have not been read individually - the labels are different because the evidence behind them is different, and we do not blur that.
Communication appears in 142,767 postings. Is that useful?
On its own, no - and we do not pretend otherwise. Its value is comparative: which of your programmes evidences it, in which course, assessed how. The taxonomy's job is to make that question answerable with one vocabulary across every programme and every market, not to rank skills by frequency.
Can we add our own skills?
Institution-specific terms can be mapped into the taxonomy so your syllabus language resolves to the governed concept underneath it. What you cannot do is publish a skill to your dashboard that has not cleared verification or validation - including one of your own. The bar exists so the numbers mean the same thing on every campus.
Bring your syllabus. We will show you the vocabulary underneath it.
Forty-five minutes, your programmes mapped against governed skills, on screen.
We reply within 48 hours. +91 88796 54341