Top Employers Are Looking for Candidates With The Right Set Of Skills

Philadelphia-based nonprofit Burning Glass Institute has launched a career website in partnership with 10 blue-chip brands designed to define, clarify, track, and update the skills needed in today’s ever-evolving job market.

The Big Picture: The economic and technological rollercoaster of the past few years has overcomplicated the job market for both employers and prospective employees. By bringing daylight to what skills are needed for jobs, companies may be able to attract a wider net of qualified candidates who weren’t well-versed in LinkedIn jargon.

Behind the Hires: The SkillsFirst website is launching with the participation of Accenture, Bank of America, Blackstone, Home Depot, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Nordstrom, PepsiCo, Walmart, and Verizon.

• To start, the site covers the skills for nine job titles —  retail salesperson, first-line supervisors of retail sales workers, sales managers, customer service reps, customer service managers, financial analysts, product managers, and software developers.
• Burning Glass plans to expand that roster of roles and associated skill sets to 30 in the coming months.
• Now, onto the skills — the website organizes them into four categories (baseline, leadership, role-specific, and specialization), ranks their importance for specific roles, and defines the level of proficiency required for each.
• Breaking Glass says it decides on the criteria by analyzing and cross-referencing tens of millions of job postings. It also gets direct input from employers.
• The site also lists the “wage premium” for having a specific skill, such as companies willing to pay 5% more to product managers with UX experience.

The Future: Matt Sigelman, president of the Burning Glass Institute, says that “there are skills that are growing in popularity now that will decline, and there are skills that will hit the radar that aren’t on the radar now.” So, SkillsFirst could be a valuable resource for college students who want to learn in-demand skills before entering the workforce, as well as for employees aiming for a promotion by showing them which skills to focus on to become indispensable.

Verizon, which transitioned to a skills-first approach to hiring and promoting in 2021, says that the change led to an average company tenure of 13.1 years — 70% more than the national average.