A new tool for upskilling your business

The Skills Discovery tool has 2 elements to it – make a role comparison and create a skills profile.

Make a role comparison

You can use it to compare a current role with a desired role to see how closely aligned they are in terms of knowledge and meta skills.

Meta skills are various qualities such as innovation and self-management that are needed to turn knowledge into job performance. See our meta skills page to find out more.

Create a skills profile

You can also build a skills profile of your business over all the roles it employs, for up to 35 roles. If you have more than 35 roles, we suggest doing the skills organisational profile by department.

Dashboard

The tool has a dashboard that pulls through your latest reports for both these elements.

You can print or download your role comparisons and skills profiles reports to keep or share with colleagues.

The data we use

The data comes from two main sources. The O*NET Resource Centre has a database with thousands of job roles broken down into the tasks, knowledge and meta skills relevant to each one.

To show you the specialised skills needed, we also work with Lightcast, a company that uses real-time job market data to match employer demand with training opportunities. We look at the previous 3 years jobs postings data and present the ones most frequently mentioned by percentage.

How it works

When you select 2 job roles, these roles are mapped to occupations within the O*NET database. Each occupation in the database lists the common tasks, knowledge, work activities and styles that are required. For each of these items, an importance level is displayed which indicates the relevance of that item to the role.

To calculate an alignment between the selected roles, each item of knowledge and meta skill for the two roles is compared. An overall indication of how closely the roles match is generated by looking at how many items are similar and how many items are dissimilar.

In addition, a report on the specialised skills used in each role is provided.

Your feedback is key – good and bad

Your feedback on the quality and usefulness of the tool and its data will help us to develop and improve it.

For example, tell us if you felt the job roles you compared were aligned as you expected, and if the next steps were clear and useful to you in making business decisions, particularly around workforce development and succession planning.

Use the main feedback button at the bottom right of the window to give us your feedback.