Research and analysis

Extending the UK Standard Skills Classification

Published 30 April 2026

As the classification content stabilises and becomes adopted there are several opportunities to extend the framework in useful ways. This section outlines 5 examples.

1. Proficiency levels for occupational mappings

Proficiency levels are currently only given for occupations against Core Skills but preliminary stakeholder feedback has indicated a need for proficiency levels for Occupational Skills as well. These would also help define educational pathways and measure progression.

2. Skill ability requirement profiles (to evaluate potential)

There are several examples of workplace related models of human ability such as Fleishman’s taxonomy of human abilities which was used as the basis of the O*NET Ability Framework.

As well as profiling individuals, these models can be used to profile specific skills and, in turn, predict the relative difficulty that different individuals would face acquiring or improving their proficiency. This would therefore enable estimates of skill development potential (such as an individual’s innate compatibility with various career/skill development pathways) and tailoring of access to work support.

3. Open skill and knowledge curricula

There is potential to build on the existing concept labels, descriptions and proficiency definitions to create basic curricula for each UK Standard Skills Classification (SSC) Skill and Knowledge concept, including links to related education resources and learning outcomes. These would enable or guide self-led learning and simplify the creation of highly personalised learning pathways by educators for students or by employers for new or existing employees

4. SSC specialist skill coding index

While the SSC does include alternate labels of Occupational Skills, it does not include an exhaustive list of skill specialisms (such as data analysis with a niche software library or statistical technique). Such a dataset would be similar to the existing ONS Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) Coding index published to help users match job titles to SOC groups.

Creating a method to capture and map specialist skills to existing SSC concepts in a similar way would help improve the accuracy of both automated (such as AI driven) and ad-hoc matching. It would also help identify skills that do not fit into the existing classification and indicate where new skill concepts may need to be added, or existing ones changed in scope.

5. Sector specific SSC standard occupational profiles

The size of the UK limits the granularity of labour market information that can be collected cost-effectively which, in turn, limits the specificity of our Standard Occupational Classification (SOC). Skill and Knowledge requirements can therefore vary significantly between job roles coded to the same occupational group, even at the more detailed six-digit level. This means that SSC Skill or Task profiles linked to SOC groups are imprecise and are therefore of limited use in assigning skills or expertise to incumbents. SSC SOC profiles could however be broken down further to, for example, sector-specific specialisms. This would simplify skill profiling as an individual would only need to provide a job title and specific employer context to identify and compare acquired and required skillsets.