In late 2025 Skills England published its UK Standard Skills Classification and an accompanying Skills Explorer tool - here, Charlie Ball explains why universities, careers and employability professionals, employers and others should sit up and take notice
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Episode transcript
- Host: Dan Mason, editorial manager, Prospects Luminate
- Host: Micha Smith, information analyst, Prospects Luminate
- Charlie Ball, head of labour market intelligence, Jisc
00:00:05 Dan Mason
Hello and welcome to the Prospects Luminate podcast, the place to come for in-depth conversations about the data, trends and research shaping how we think about early careers, employability and the graduate labour market in the UK. My name's Dan Mason.
Towards the end of 2025, the government body Skills England published its UK Standard Skills Classification, a comprehensive list of all the skills, knowledge and tasks required for UK occupations, and alongside it, a UK Skills Explorer tool. Skills England described this as a common language, a free resource for individuals, careers advisers, employers and anyone involved in labour market analysis that would help all of those groups navigate a very complex topic in a more coherent way than had been possible previously.
But why should we take notice? Well, at the time, our own labour market expert here at Jisc, Charlie Ball, described it as a gamechanger, and he knows what he's talking about so in this episode, my colleague Micha Smith gave Charlie the opportunity to explain just what it is about this development that makes it so exciting, and why you need to know about it.
Before we get started, do remember to subscribe and follow the podcast on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you prefer to listen. Head to luminate.prospects.ac.uk for all the latest insights. And get in touch with any feedback or suggestions by emailing editor@luminate.prospects.ac.uk. And with that, let's hear from Charlie, here he is speaking to Micha.
00:01:37 Micha Smith
Hello everyone and welcome to the show. Today we're joined by Charlie Ball, Jisc's in-house labour market specialist. Charlie, it's a pleasure to have you here with us today.
00:01:45 Charlie Ball
It's a pleasure to be here, Micha. Thanks for inviting me on.
00:01:49 Micha Smith
In this episode, we'll be exploring the new UK Standard Skills Classification. We want to get into why it was developed, who stands to benefit from it, and how tools like Skills Explorer can help students and jobseekers to identify their skills, understand different pathways, and navigate the labour market with more confidence. When I first heard about the UK Standard Skills Classification, I thought to myself, this sounds interesting. But the more I looked into it, I began to realise like how exciting this project actually is.
00:02:24 Charlie Ball
Yes, I mean, you've got me on to talk basically about a taxonomy, which is all very, very exciting. But I mean, the thing is, something like this is something that the UK has needed for a long time. And although it might seem quite impenetrable and rather nerdy, and in some ways it is, it's also a really significant development in terms of allowing, it to become actually easier for the various different people and actors in the whole sphere of employment, for employers, to providers, to applicants, be able to talk to each other more effectively and understand what one another have to offer and what they want. And so it should ultimately help make help make employers write better job ads and make them easier to apply for for applicants. And that's quite a big impact for what might seem quite a distant and unrelatable topic.
00:03:27 Micha Smith
Yeah, and that's what I mean by exciting. It's a really important, important project, isn't it?
00:03:34 Charlie Ball
It is, and it's been a long, long time in the making as well. It's something that we've known that we've needed to do in the UK for many, many years. But the scale of the task has been very, very daunting. And of course, the funding required to do it has seemed very, very daunting. So it's very nice and to an extent, a little bit of a surprise, that we've managed to get to where we are now with something that at least, you know, that seems to work. And we just need to make sure that people are aware of it and start to adopt it.
00:04:07 Micha Smith
Yeah. And I noticed the US has had the O*NET since about the late 90s. Why has the UK lagged behind in the development?
00:04:18 Charlie Ball
Well, fundamentally, so there are a couple of reasons. O*NET is an absolutely brilliant resource, but it did cost a lot of money to develop. So we've lagged behind in doing it because firstly, we baulked at the costs because the US spent a lot of money on doing a very, very good job. And secondly, we've actually been using O*NET. Now, O*NET is very American-centric and falls over in a lot of places where the UK and the US jobs market don't really match, which is actually quite a lot more places than I think people realise. But we were kind of making do and mending with it for quite a long time. But the tensions inherent in using a US-built system in what is actually quite a different jobs market that uses different language were, have always been quite strong. And ultimately, we muddled along for quite a long time before deciding that we had to do something about it ourselves. So yeah in a way, O*NET is so good that we piggybacked off it basically.
00:05:34 Micha Smith
Yeah, and that's actually what I was going to ask next. I saw it suggested that even though the UK is behind in this regard because it started later, it now benefits from the research and methodological lessons.
00:05:46 Charlie Ball
Yeah, it does. And there are similar initiatives across the EU as well that we've also benefited from. We, you know, O*NET pioneered this kind of work in this kind of detail. And so it was by taking that template and to be honest, taking quite a lot of the information out of O*NET and using O*NET as a, as an example, we developed this classification of our own. So it is very much O*NET inspired. And to my mind quite right too, O*NET is so good. There's no need to reinvent the wheel in producing this sort of work. O*NET has done it so well.
00:06:25 Micha Smith
Yeah. And I saw, I was reading the report that was released in 2023 and it mentioned that the Employer Skills Survey was able to identify all the shortages, but when it came to the specific skills in short supply, that's where the, you know.
00:06:45 Charlie Ball
That might have been that might have been my contribution to that report, actually, because I was part of it, and anybody who's worked with me for a while knows that sounds like me, actually. I can't exactly remember what my contributions were. But yeah, that was very much an issue. So, and that actually highlights the problem that we had. We have a survey, which is a brilliant survey called the Employer Skills Survey, which doesn't look at skills. It looks at occupations. And it looks at, it looks, it does sort of look at skills, but mostly it looks at occupations, it uses largely occupations.
And the reason we needed this unified skills framework is basically because across the whole piece, people used the word skills interchangeably to mean actually a whole bunch of different things, some of which we had measures for, some of which we didn't. And crucially, whilst that seems like a point of pedantry, and to an extent it is, when it comes down to it, if you need to address these shortages, if you need to address an occupational shortage, if you need to address subject knowledge shortage, if you need to address, for example, IT skill shortages, the actual methods by which you address them and the people who you need to bring into play to address them are actually very different.
And so, and using skills across everything, we've got a skill shortage and so we'll do something skillsy to fix it. No, it doesn't work like that. If you've got a shortage of plumbers, there's no point having a whole bunch of people who'll train you in IT skills or a boost in the number of engineers. You need to train people to be plumbers. If you've got a shortage of people with communication skills, there's no point training a bunch of plumbers to do it. You need actual specific skills, not course level training, not training of a particular subject. You need a specific set of trainers who will train, and so on and so forth and so putting that language together properly so we're not just saying, oh, it's skills, whenever a shortage of nurses or of IT skills or of communication skills come up and you see, even there, I've used skills as the word.
But if you've got a shortage of nurses, you've got an occupational shortage. If you've got a shortage of trade training, you've got a training skills shortage, and if you've got a shortage of soft skills you've got a different set of shortages as well. So, and they're all addressed in different ways. So using the word skills to describe all of it is actively counterproductive because it makes the thing seem a lot simpler. It makes the thing seem like there's a skills problem, but it doesn't address the issue that when employers say we have a skills shortage and education providers say, we're providing skills training, and students say, I have these skills, they're all talking about different things.
00:10:08 Micha Smith
Yeah, sure. Okay, let's dig into what the framework actually looks like. As the Standard Skills Classification hierarchy runs from 22 skills domains to over 3,000 occupational skills. Why was it important to build something with this level of granularity?
00:10:28 Charlie Ball
Well, to be honest, this is the O*NET thing. This is the O*NET thing. And we've actually gone more granular than O*NET in this particular case, because our occupational classification, the occupational classification system used is more detailed. For a small country, we have an unusually complicated jobs market and an unusually complicated structure of ways into these particular roles with lots and lots and lots of specialist niches that require specialist training. And also a lot of generalist niches, particularly in business services, whereby there are lots and lots of different subject level ways in, but which require niche skills.
So, you know, for example, and I'm looking in particular, so I normally use the UK Standard Skills Classification, because this is the way I'm familiar with it, at occupational level. So if you look at two jobs that have similar entry requirements, so insurance underwriters and accountancy technicians, which are in this classification, sorry, let's go, because they're quite vague. Really, so here's a really good example in building and construction. So we're going to look at building and construction, building and construction level occupations, and we're going to look in, sorry it just takes a moment for it to go.
00:11:51 Micha Smith
No, it's fine. Is that the Skills Explorer tool?
00:11:54 Charlie Ball
Yes, so it's the Skills Explorer tool, which has been really, really nicely put together. Actually, as also they've used AI quite a bit in developing it, because AI is quite good at developing structures for this kind of thing. So if you look at ostensibly, quite closely related roles, so we're looking here in 2122 these are the forms of engineers, so automotive engineers and marine engineers, very closely related disciplines. You actually need slightly different degrees, but some of the stuff is, is reasonably transferable across. We do have specific automotive engineering degrees. We do have specific naval engineering degrees. But by and large, you need mechanical engineering and associated qualifications. But if you look at the actual skills required, they then start to become quite different because you're looking at different kinds of engine structures and this kind of stuff.
And so what this allows you to do is, if you're an applicant, for example, say you've taken a mechanical engineering degree and you're hot on engines, engine tech is something that you're particularly good at. You can then go through the jobs that are particularly strong and particularly likely to look at requirements for engines and start to have a think, yeah, this might be suitable for me because a lot of people go in with a vague idea of what they want to do. But if you can tweak this sort of thing for, or you can tweak the sort of thing that you would want to have a look at in terms of the skills that you're particularly good at or interested in doing. And it will, it takes a look in quite a bit of detail and allows you to distinguish between quite similar ostensibly role, ostensible roles, but the sort of actual skills that you are going to need and breaking down those jobs. And so you've got these core skill proficiency scores, that say.
So if we go, so engineering is perhaps not the ideal example after I spent after a huge amount of time trying to actually find that, so let's have a look at something in reasonably closely related financial roles. So if we take a look at, here we go, this is a good example. So say you want to be a financial accountant, but you're thinking, oh, I might want to be a forensic accountant. What's the difference? What's the actual practical difference? The skills framework gives you a really, really good understanding of actually in practice exactly the sort of skills and the sort of skills proficiencies these kind of roles require in practice from employers. So you can take a look at that and go, actually, I'm pretty good at the project planning side of things so this might be the job for me and so on and so forth. So that level of granularity allows a certain amount of distinction between similar but distinct jobs.
00:15:09 Micha Smith
Yeah, and don't worry, we will get a bit more into the Skills Explorer tool later on, because that's really what excited me when I started going through the Skills Explorer. I was like, oh my, as a researcher, and then I was thinking, wow, I wish I would have had a tool like this when I was going to college.
00:15:25 Charlie Ball
Oh, yes, absolutely the same, yeah.
00:15:29 Micha Smith
For sure. One thing, can you briefly explain the distinction between occupational skills and core skills?
00:15:37 Charlie Ball
Occupational skills are things specific to the job. So, let's go back to mechanical engineering. So, say you're a mechanical engineer, you're an automotive engineer, so you'll be working on bodywork, and you'll be working on electronics and transmission, and you'll be working on engines, and they're the occupational skills, but then you'll also have a whole bunch of core skills. Things like project management, team working, communications, that are all necessary and often necessary for every job to an extent. And you can get them from most courses or from specialist training that will do that kind of thing. So those are the crucial things.
Now they've got them grouped into particular formats, planning and organising, adapting, working with others, listening, speaking, leadership, learning, investigating, creating, etc etc. If you've gone to university or college or university, all of your courses to some extent should teach you the basics of these things. But some of them you'll be stronger at than others. Some courses will teach you more of those than others. And it's just a useful pointer. And then of course, you know, if you look under leadership, for example, there is 335 skills in leadership, for example. that you could possibly have picked up. But it does allow you to go in and see, well, if I've got this skill, I can put it in the Skills Explorer. Where does it fall? What broader heading does it come under? And then what jobs use those skills?
So, you know, if you liked being the captain of a sport, being a captain of your sports team, or if you liked event, organising socials, you could take a look at all of that stuff and go, where could I adapt that actually in practice? And then it can spit out a whole bunch of jobs that you've heard of, and probably quite a few that you haven't, that you can then look at and go, oh yeah, actually, that sounds interesting. And oh yeah, I actually tick the boxes for that. Maybe I could take a look at it. And it's important also to stress that very few people, even for their dream job that they've been training for, will tick every single box. But if you tick the majority of them, it's something that you can then start to consider, and it helps you open out options.
Now, to some extent, it might help you open out options to a ridiculous degree, but then it helps you refine them down. So, if you say, well, actually, I want something that allows me to manage people, but I don't want to do too much public speaking. You can then filter out all the ones where public speaking and that kind of thing are really important, etc etc, and it allows you to kind of refine down a potential job search, a potential occupation search, the kind of roles you might be interested in much more effectively.
00:18:30 Micha Smith
Yeah. And one thing that I found interesting is, of course, we always hear about how high education institutions need to align the curricula to mirror skills needs of the wider economy. But it seems like without this development, that was nearly impossible.
00:18:46 Charlie Ball
Well, I mean, essentially, a lot of institutions have produced kind of versions of this in-house in order to basically do this, to do that exactly as you say. A lot of institutions have made strides in, or not all of them, made strides in understanding their core jobs markets and the exact provisions. But normally, the way that often works is, you know, an institution will be working with an employer group providing work experience and maybe even co-designing elements of the curriculum and the employer group will be saying we need the graduates with these skills and attributes and the university will be working along those lines. So often it will be in that kind of respect. Now everybody can sing from the same linguistic hymn sheets.
00:19:33 Micha Smith
Yeah, that's what.
00:19:34 Charlie Ball
And that makes it, that makes things a lot clearer for everybody.
00:19:38 Micha Smith
Yeah, that's what I was trying to get at. I didn't want to insinuate that university students are not leaving university with skills.
00:19:43 Charlie Ball
No, but you're absolutely, you're absolutely right. Universities have been doing this, but they've been they could be coming up with their own solutions, some of which are very effective, but not all, and it's diff, it's very difficult. Yeah, and now, the now they've, now essentially all the really fiddly core work has been done, or much of the, so, and the thing to bear in mind, this is much of the really fiddly core work. UK Skills Explorer and the skills classification is still in development. So it is very much a thing where providers or employers or students could come and say, well actually, there's this job and actually it needs these skills. Or you need to take into account this set of attributes or skills and so on and so forth. So this isn't going to remain, this isn't a rigid set in stone structure. This is something that will work and evolve and is designed to work and evolve as economies and skills need changes, as of course, especially with the use of large language models and other forms of AI, they are and will.
00:20:58 Micha Smith
And not just universities, but I saw that Local Skills Improvement Plans were really suffering because of this as well, where people were basically explicitly acknowledging that the absence of a standard framework has created obstacles.
00:21:13 Charlie Ball
Well, I mean, the thing with the Local Skills Improvement Plans is they're hard to build and require a lot of very scarce expertise in order to do well. And many LEPs have done a really, really good job given the resources that were available. But lacking a shared language, they, you know, it is very difficult to produce a unified set of LSIPs without the basic underlying language that you need to produce the Local Skills Improvement Plans. Now everybody knows the language.
00:21:46 Micha Smith
And just about a practical use, how could this development influence the way that employers refine job descriptions?
00:21:58 Charlie Ball
Well, essentially at the root it will stop them, hopefully it will stop them using skills as a catch-all for everything. And they can be a little bit more careful about the knowledges and the core skills and so forth and what the difference between those, what are available and what you can reasonably expect from people and particular occupations. It may also mean that they, so for example, it may also mean employers start to think, actually, we could recruit from people with this background as well as that background and think a little more carefully, but also write better, more tailored job ads that get more of the kind of applicants who hit the spots that they exactly want and avoid the kind of looseness of language that leaves them with lots of applicants who are not really who they were looking for because they didn't define the requirements very effectively.
00:23:02 Micha Smith
And do you think that it will allow for better forecasting of emerging skills?
00:23:08 Charlie Ball
That's a really interesting question because the very definition of emerging skills is they're probably not in the framework. But because there is a framework and skills don't appear out of nowhere with no relation to anything else. So for, the most obvious example is in terms of the ability to work with prompts, we can, at the moment in the skills, in the skill system, there is not a prompt engineering skill. There will be soon, I am absolutely sure, but what we'll be able to do is we'll be able to relate it to other similar skills. And put that in there and then it can get taken up. And it will, and because there are lots of other similar skills in there, you can also use those as a proxy for.
Oh sorry, mistake, so it's not in skills, prompt engineering is in knowledges. So it is there. So we've got prompt engineering in knowledges. But because that's in there, you can start to, see, that's a good example of looseness of language. I should have looked into knowledges in the first place. But we know, so that comes under digital technology, it comes under practitioners of digital technology. So we know that as that starts to be refined and we start to see different forms of prompt engineering and different kinds of prompt engineering becoming required on the market, we'll know where that goes in the framework and we'll have an idea of, because we can log how prompt engineering is being used and developed and the kind of core skills. You can also see how that might develop and amongst which occupations.
00:24:54 Micha Smith
And I was wondering, turning back to the Skills Explorer tool, how do you think this could be useful for careers advisers?
00:25:06 Charlie Ball
I mean, it's massive. I mean, fundamentally, you know, you can have a look at occupations, for example. So say somebody wants to be an environmental scientist you can go and have a look, you can go straight into the role and take a look at the kind of things that are expected from environmental scientist. Now a lot of this sort of thing is second nature for careers professionals who know this sort of thing already, but it really helps you get to grips and particularly if somebody comes to you with a slightly left field interest or slightly left field set of skills or an unusual qualification. It's actually probably in here. So, not the general, it's not the general by the way things that often give careers advisers pause. It's somebody doing an unusual qualification or who has a or who has a particular unexpected set of interests and they say, you know, how can I fit my, how can I get a job that works around my particular set of interests. And you can take a look in the Skills Explorer and see what's out there that might actually work around that.
So that makes things easier for careers professionals, but also just on a fundamental level, it helps for them to make the point to people that skills can mean a different, different groups of things and they're delivered and trained in different ways. So it also helps them if somebody, if somebody says, I want to train to do, I'd like to get some Python training or I'd like to improve my ability to speak in public. It helps them refine where that will be useful and how that training might be delivered.
00:27:05 Micha Smith
Yeah, I was also wondering if perhaps this could lead to a shift from focusing on degrees and more towards skill profiles.
00:27:18 Charlie Ball
Yeah, and you hear a lot in recruitment about skills-based hiring being more important, which of course plays into this. And essentially, as you say, degree subjects becomes less important than the qualities you've acquired through your study at university or college. And to an extent that's already the case in the UK jobs market. I think one of the things that people, that we really need to bring home to everybody, policy and sector and students alike, is that actually most UK jobs for graduates are reasonably subject blind. It's the set of core skills and knowledges that you've got from those subjects that are really valuable to employers.
And so it helps to be able to point out, it's not so much the situation of your chemistry graduate going, right, I'm interested in a job in chemistry. What opportunities do I have? It's more when your chemistry graduate goes, well, I've done chemistry and actually I've decided I don't really want to work in the chemicals industry, but I do want to do something that makes good use of my degree. What can I, you know, what sort of things are out there? What sort of things that are available? And they don't just have to say, management consultancy, as is traditional. But the reason, of course, that employers say management consultants, or careers advisers say management consulting in those situations, is because management consultancy is a well-paid job. There are lots of opportunities in it, and they will take people from any discipline. So it's not the lazy answer. It's the best answer to that question. But there are lots of other answers to that question as well.
00:29:01 Micha Smith
OK, and turning a bit to the method, to the methodology, I'm not sure if you would actually be able to answer this, but I think you could. What were the biggest technical or methodological challenges in ensuring that the classification is valid and reliable across occupations?
00:29:20 Charlie Ball
So I was involved in the early stages and I was part of the group that helped refine the approach but didn't actually conduct the exercise. So I was there, basically, we were sorting out how would we do this? Should it be done, first. And then how would we do it? How would we do this? And the biggest challenge was simply the scale. There's always simply the scale of it. I mean, it is a huge, huge job. And actually, the team that did it are world class. So that was, that was a big advantage that they were able and available and able to do it. And amongst the best in the world at job related taxonomies. So that was a that was a big help. But yeah, it was always an issue of scale because as I said, we had a, there wasn't there were examples and particularly O*NET was the example that was already available and we were able to, they were able to draw on that for that, for that particular set of set of work, but at the same time, and actually, yes, and also the there's the EU version, which was ESCO, which is ESCO, the European Skills Competencies Qualifications and Occupations Framework. So, the first judgment was which of the two are we going to follow most closely, and we decided on O*NET because the structure of it was a little bit more in line with the way that we wanted to do it. Although there was some stuff taken from ESCO, because ESCO is also very, very good. So that was that technical challenge.
And then essentially it was just getting it done. And I couldn't speak exactly to how that was done, but I do know that in the end, a lot of the validation, a lot of the initial validations are matching against whether the skills qualifications worked actually, they did make use of automated and AI tools to do that kind of thing, although of course it was in the end overseen by genuine world class experts. So lots of the kind of grunt work of does the language match, are the words used the same, which are very effectively done by AI, were done by AI. So that helps surmount the major technical challenge. Because brutally put, essentially, this is just a massive, at core, a lot of this is just a massive listing exercise and then a massive language matching exercise. It requires a lot of skill and finesse to do that, but the bulk of the work is simply recording an enormous quantity of information, and AI tools actually do that very well.
00:32:21 Micha Smith
Yeah. And I know you said that it is still being developed. I was just wondering, once it is developed, is there a plan to update it over time?
00:32:31 Charlie Ball
I would imagine, so all of the occupational classes, all of the taxonomy frameworks that the ONS maintains, this will fall into the ONS, are maintained on a particular schedule, a timescale. So if you think about the one that I'm most familiar with, the Standard Occupational Classification system, you get updates to it, additions and slight tweaks to it every month. But the whole classification is reviewed and updated every ten years.
00:33:00 Micha Smith
Okay, I didn't know it was updated that often.
00:33:03 Charlie Ball
Yeah, we get updates, you know, basically, basically as new jobs emerge, they're slotted into the framework. And that happens every month. And occasionally you'll get submissions for a new occupational group. And some of those go through me. When, for example, professional bodies see changes in their work environment, they'll put together a body of evidence that they pass on to the ONS and the ONS judge and usually say, yeah, that's right. So last year, for example, I was involved in just mostly in an information conduit way really, in some stuff that's, some stuff around, what was the word, health and safety, health and safety professionals and some nuances of the way that environmental protection and health and safety roles were classified that led to a slight tweaking of the framework to tighten up the language. So, but which is really, really valuable. And sometimes you need that expert input from professional bodies in order to be able to do that.
And we would anticipate because, for obvious reasons, not every professional body in the country has been has been consulted immediately on the Skills Explorer and it'll take them all time to get to go through that and work out the little nuances and the quirks of their own sector. So that will happen over a period of time and there will be a, submissions made to the framework and little changes and bits and bobs and you'll see probably skills and competencies being added to some of these occupational frameworks and so on and so forth. What the schedule is and exactly how that will work, I don't think is completely worked out at the moment. I may be wrong. But as far as I'm aware that, we're still in a work in progress situation rather than a settled classification. So I think there's an assumption that this classification will go through a number of reasonably significant, I mean, it won't be rewritten wholesale, but you will see some changes over time. But it will take a while simply because of the scale of the thing and the opportunity for everybody affected to properly have a look at it and have a think about what they could do to improve it.
00:35:32 Micha Smith
Okay, and just looking ahead before we close out, how do you see the Standard Skills Classification shaping UK skills policy over the next decade?
00:35:43 Charlie Ball
Well, I mean, the first thing is we've got to get people using it. So actually, that's the big challenge. It's there, I think, and most of the people who are involved in it think it's really, really good and really, really useful. But as you say, a lot of the stakeholders have developed their own frameworks which they're quite attached to because they put a lot of work into. A lot of people have seen it and are quite daunted by it or are concerned that it's going to be used for things like league tables and performance measures. I mean, it won't, it can't be. But there are concerns that, you know, you will, there will be some kind of judgment made from it. The sheer complexity puts people off and a lot of people simply haven't heard of it. So it's going to take a while before this sort of thing is embedded into general usage and it can really start to have an impact. But I would hope in the short term, particularly in terms of policy, it will tighten up the language. So basically people don't use the word skills to describe everything.
00:36:45 Micha Smith
Yeah, I understand that because as you said, I've known about it since, since you posted about it on LinkedIn or you commented on someone's post on LinkedIn, but it wasn't until recently that I actually looked into it. I was like, well, I should have been using this in my work.
00:37:00 Charlie Ball
Well, yeah, I mean, once you look at it, even if you think, oh god, this is just Charlie banging on about another taxonomy, like he always gets excited about. But you look at it and you're absolutely blown away by the sheer scale and the effort that it must have taken to put this together.
00:37:13 Micha Smith
Yeah.
00:37:14 Charlie Ball
And it really is a testament to the teams that have been involved in this who are, as I say, best in the world at this sort of thing. They are, it's, oh, it's such an impressive piece of work. It's such an in-depth piece of work. It's such a meticulous and potentially useful piece of work. It's not, it's one of those things that doesn't, I think one of the concerns that people have is a bit of a straitjacket, but I don't think it is. It's so, well designed that I don't think it'll be a straitjacket for people. It will actually be freeing.
00:37:48 Micha Smith
Yeah, I agree.
00:37:49 Charlie Ball
Because it will make employers realise instead of, you know, instead of ticking, because I think when you say there's a skills framework, they think, oh god, all jobs will have to tick, there'll be like ten boxes they can tick from and choose from, but no, there are a lot more of them than that. And what it does is it makes you think more carefully about what a job actually requires and think of what a job could be or could have included in it. And I think that's actually quite freeing.
00:38:23 Micha Smith
Yeah.
00:38:24 Charlie Ball
And I think it can allow people to be quite creative and quite thoughtful. And also it will allow employers to create points of difference in their role. So if they say, right, okay, we're a, so imagine you're a, we're in Manchester, so imagine you're a design agency in the Northern Quarter, but you would need to recruit an accountant. You can look at this sort of thing and say, well, actually, we're going to want an accountant, but they're actually also going to need to at least be a bit interested in the work that we do. So we'll put a bit of design skill in there as well, which is optional, but it means that we'll get a slightly different kind of accountant to somebody who's working for a legal firm. And we can practically formalise that while still maintaining the essential accountantness of the role. And we can be really, really, we can at the same time be really, really precise. and really, really clear, but also a bit creative. And I think that that's where the real power will come in. You can leave a certain amount of looseness because not everybody will have to fit every criterion, but also be quite creative about what you're looking for. So, you know, you can tailor the role. So if you want a coder who also actually does training, as opposed to, or you want to, you want a legal professional who also actually will have to handle some of the accounts management. This will, that allows you to be really precise instead of vague about exactly what it is that you're looking for. And I think that will be really freeing.
00:40:09 Micha Smith
Yeah, I agree. I agree. Well, tthat brings us to the end of today's episode. A huge thank you to Charlie Ball for joining us and shedding light on the UK Standard Skills Classification.
00:40:21 Charlie Ball
Thanks, Micha. I hope your listeners find that useful.
00:40:24 Micha Smith
Yeah, I'm sure they will. If you found this discussion useful, you can explore more insights and resources on Prospects Luminate. And don't forget to check out tools like the Skills Explorer to see the framework in action.
Note on transcript
This transcript was created using a combination of automated software and human transcribers. The audio version is definitive and should be checked before quoting.
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