The UK Standard Skills Classification gets an update

The work being done to develop the UK Standard Skills Classification is necessarily slow and iterative.

As we’ve been over before on the site, the idea is for the entire skills expanded universe to speak the same (ontological) language. Getting to that stage requires the recognition of a number of interests and potential use cases – keeping everyone on board, and preserving links to all kinds of related vocabularies is no easy task.

Version 1.0 – out today to mark the official launch – has landmark numbering but really represents a small update to the previous beta version (0.9). The Skills Explorer has been updated, and there’s a revised version of the development report: now shorn of “interim status” but with much of the same text as was released in November.

In the future there will be annual updates, but the very next version will likely be available in late September 2026. Each version draws on feedback from users, and consequent revisions both to the vocabulary itself and the linkages between skills and external coding frameworks.

So what’s new in version 1.0? It adds information at various parts of the hierarchy – an additional skills group (there are now 607 at this third level of the classification) and an additional seven individual occupational skills. This latter category (there are 3,350 of them in version 1.0) is the basic building block of the SSC: with links to occupational tasks (22,583 discrete things that an employee may be asked to do) and knowledge concepts (5,056 things that employees may be expected to understand).

At the lower level there has been substantial refinement to the description of each skill: the sense I have is that the newer versions are much clearer about the specific tasks required. Mappings of skills to occupations (the UK’s venerable Standard Occupational Classifications or SOCs) and other relevant classifications – the HECoS subject areas we use in higher education included.

Lastly we have a new underpinning categorisation of occupational skills – AI skills joins green skills, STEM-M&H skills, numeracy skills, and digital skills as a custom classification.

Though the SSC is undoubtedly a powerful tool, it will only gain salience if it is widely used. For this reason the development of the explorer tool is important, though I do regret to note that the ability to download the framework and supporting mappings appears to have been (temporarily?) lost. [Edit: the downloads are available but need you to be signed in, which you’d have to know in order to access them.]

And as this framework matures, I hope that a version history – showing precisely the changes made between each iteration – and an archive of previous versions can be established. You’ll have noted that I wasn’t able to tell you the name of the additional skills group that was added: I would have liked to.

That’s just a data hygiene point – it should not be taken as a reason not to engage with the SSC, which looks set to underpin skills planning and job design in future and provides a welcome systemisation to the murky world of ensuring that we are training and developing the people that we need to do the jobs that need to be done.