How to create a skills taxonomy and role-based skill lists when setting up MuchSkills

📽️ Watch: Step-by-step guide to building your skills taxonomy and skill lists for roles, teams & competencies

In this video, MuchSkills co-founder Daniel Nilsson walks you through his personal process for creating role-based skill lists and taxonomies—based on hundreds of client implementations across the globe.

‍

Why role-based skill lists and taxonomies matter

A clearly defined skills taxonomy ensures that you align your workforce’s capabilities with business goals. By identifying and organizing the most important skills per role, department, or area of expertise, you enable:

• Better hiring and resource planning
• Employee development and internal mobility
• Clearer role expectations and coaching conversations
• Consistent feedback and career planning frameworks
• Accurate skill gap and upskilling analysis

‍

MuchSkills foundational Skills Taxonomy

⏬ We have prepared a foundational skills taxonomy, which can be downloaded here. This can serve as a preliminary template as you create your own skills taxonomy.

The foundational skills taxonomy includes:

• Essential human skills: This category encompasses soft skills, cultural abilities, and behavioural competencies.
• Global skills: The hard skills we aim to map.
• Specialisations: These are different categories of skills representing specialisations. The base taxonomy includes Dev & Tech, Design & Product, Cloud and Infrastructure, and Data Specialisation.
• Methodologies & frameworks: This includes typical methodologies, frameworks, and laws vital for tech companies.
• Technical skills: MuchSkills provides over 20,000 technical skills (software and development languages) out of the box, making it unlikely that you'll need to add any technical skills. You can browse and search the database of technical skills here.

Depending on your needs and business operations, you may consider adding additional skill categories, such as:

• Clients: Map employee competencies for different clients to simplify resource planning for delivery teams.
• Core competencies /Service offerings: This category is typically used in consultancy firms, where you map employees' skill levels in the services offered, helping resource planners understand each consultant's specialty.
• Languages: We recommend adding this category for employees to list their language skills, such as English, Spanish, German, etc. MuchSkills provides built-in templates for adding all languages. This category not only adds a "fun" element for employees but also reveals the variety of languages known among colleagues.
• My preferences and interests: Allows the users to list preferences in travel, games, hobbies, sports, etc. It's an excellent way to encourage employees to connect over shared interests.

‍

Example: Skills per roles & competences

When developing your skills taxonomy, we recommend starting by identifying skills associated with each role, competency, or department.

⏬ To assist you, we have created a core template that can guide and inspire your process. You can download the skill list categorised by role or competency here.

Our method for refining or constructing the skills taxonomy involves initially defining the skills for various roles, competencies, or departments. Subsequently, we consolidate all the skills into different categories within the taxonomy.

Once the taxonomy is complete and uploaded to MuchSkills, the defined skills per role, competency, or department can be utilised to create skill lists in the MuchSkills Analysis section. These lists can be used by both employees and managers for strategic workforce planning and skill gap analysis.

‍

ChatGPT prompt template to create skills per role

We have developed a ChatGPT prompt to generate role-specific skills, as demonstrated in the example below for an IT Risk Analyst. To use this, simply download the template by clicking here, and replace the skills taxonomy in the Word document with your own. Then, paste the prompt into ChatGPT and specify the role for which you want to create a skills list. Please ensure you review the results thoroughly, as they may not be perfect.

‍

‍

Get assistance from the MuchSkills team

We are happy to provide you with assistance and advice as you create your own skills taxonomy and skills definitions for roles. To get in touch, click on the chat icon on the bottom right on this page or send an email to wow@muchskills.com