Lightcast, a global leader in labor market analytics, has partnered with Guild, a comprehensive education and skilling solution for building talent, to integrate Lightcast skills intelligence within Guild Talent Advantage™, Guild’s expanded product suite.
The average US job has seen a 37% change in required skills over five years, showing the need for continual assessment and training to keep up with a dynamic market. Yet as the world of work shifts rapidly with AI and new technologies, 95% of executives admit they don’t think they’re investing enough to keep skills relevant. At the same time, companies that make strategic investments in employee development increase their profitability by at least 11%. The need for relevant, business-aligned educational programs in the workforce is urgent, making it essential that these programs are efficiently verified, deployed, and provide reliable results to help businesses facilitate internal mobility and activate skilled talent. Lightcast and Guild are now making this possible.
Through Guild’s platform, employers will be able to access skills data reporting for employees who are enrolled in or have completed a program through Guild’s Learning Marketplace. This reporting gives employers consistent and clear visibility into the skills employees are gaining through their Guild program. With skills verified by Lightcast, Guild, and learning institutions in Guild’s Learning Marketplace, employers can be confident in making better, data-driven decisions for the future of their workforce.
“To get a full picture of the labor market and build a future-ready workforce, you need to be looking at skills,” said Gresham Schlect, Chief Technology Officer at Lightcast. “It’s a huge advantage for an employer to quickly and reliably understand the skills their employees already possess, because it helps ensure an efficient and accurate workforce planning strategy. Integrating the Lightcast Open Skills Taxonomy—the common language of the labor market— into educational offerings like those offered through Guild goes beyond an individual employee’s growth and connects these programs to actual business outcomes.”
Lightcast’s Open Skills Taxonomy is the gold standard for understanding skills and jobs in the modern labor market, sourced from billions of job postings and profiles to reflect real-world needs in accessible terms. With over 32,000 skills and growing, Lightcast provides the world’s most comprehensive system for understanding skills, utilized by over 65% of the Fortune 100 companies and thousands of education providers and government organizations. Guild has fed each program description from its Learning Marketplace into Lightcast’s enrichment process to map and classify skills within a curriculum. From there, Guild’s learning providers review, revise, and validate the output. Just as the Skills Taxonomy has been verified by human experts at Lightcast, the skills tagged to programs have been individually verified by Guild’s learning providers to ensure accuracy on a program-by-program basis. Programs in Guild’s highly curated marketplace are designed to deliver best in class completion for learners and outcomes for employers.
“With the growing need for HR leaders to align learning and development investments with strategic business outcomes, our partnership with Lightcast sets a new standard by providing companies with skills data they can trust,” said Rohan Chandran, Chief Technology and Product Officer at Guild. “Through this partnership, companies can now see what skills employees are building through Guild’s programs and use that insight to make smart, strategic decisions about deploying talent. We are doubling down on our commitment to being a data-driven strategic partner, ensuring that our customers have the talent insights they need to champion both their people and their business.”
