Research and analysis

Extending the Standard Skills Classification

Published 27 November 2025

As the classification content stabilises and becomes adopted there are several opportunities to extend the framework in useful ways. This section outlines 6 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 the O*NET Ability Framework which incorporates the CHC model of cognitive abilities. As well as profiling individuals these constructs can also be used to profile specific skills and, in turn, evaluate the relative difficulty that 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 or skill development pathways) and tailoring of access to work support.

3. Open skill and knowledge curricula

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. AI fine-tuned SSC skill-extraction model

Existing AI tools enable the analysis and tagging of skills related text such as job adverts. This is however a multi-stage process with significant time and cost implications if this is required at scale. A language model fine-tuned to this purpose would be more efficient and JobBERT is an example of a similar existing tool that matches job related text to standard occupation profiles within the ESCO framework. If published as an open-source tool, an SSC equivalent would not only simplify maintenance and updates via faster and cheaper analysis of job advert data but also help drive down the cost of employer adoption and encourage more innovative uses.

5. 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.

6. 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. 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.