Skills and Productivity Board: Skills Taxonomy

As announced in September 2020, the new Skills and Productivity Board (SPB) will undertake expert analysis of national skills needs to inform government policy. The board is independent, composed of labour market and skills economists and chaired by business leader Stephen van Rooyen (CEO and EVP of Sky). The government established the board to provide it with evidence and analysis on gaps in our knowledge of the labour market, including identifying which skills add the most value to the economy and locating the most significant skills mismatches, both now and in the future.

Given its scope and role outlined above, the SPB requires clear definitions of skills and skills mismatches. Specifically, the SPB requires:

• A functional and operational skills 'taxonomy' - to be able to name, define and classify skills (e.g., knowledge skills, workplace skills, transferable skills).

• A way of linking these skills/skill sets to occupations and, possibly, qualifications.

We are seeking expressions of interest to undertake a scoping report on how the SPB could:

• Develop a functional skills taxonomy, possibly building on the work of others, for use

• Use this skill taxonomy to identify areas of significant skills shortage.

This report should provide:

• An overview of other work in this area (such as that based on O*NET and ESCO), outlining the pros/cons of these taxonomies and which is best to map to jobs in the UK.

• Bringing together the work currently taking place on skills taxonomies in the UK to consider how the SPB could use this within their own work to identify skills shortages. Possible extensions - including techniques such as information from web scraping vacancies and other RTI - should also be explored.

• Extending this work further to understand whether it is possible to link skills to both qualifications and occupations using these taxonomies.

Therefore, the main research question are:

• What skills taxonomies exist in the UK, and what are the pros/cons of using them to identify skill mismatches/shortages?

• How might the SPB use these taxonomies within their work given their scope/interest?

• How could these taxonomies be developed to include mapping of skills to qualifications as well as occupations?

Further information can be found in the attachment.

Assessment criteria

• Evidence of suppliers' understanding of the policy area

• Evidence of suppliers' technical/professional ability to undertake the work

• Evidence of relevant research experience.

EOI responses should be limited to 3 A4 pages maximum.

Additional information: EOI responses should be limited to 3 A4 pages.