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What is the Standard Skills Classification (SSC)?

The SSC is a free resource for learners, advisors, employers, and organisations involved in labour market analysis. At its heart, it's a standardised set of lists that breaks down the skills, knowledge and tasks required across UK occupations. But it's more than just lists – it's a common language that bridges the gap between different sectors, industries and career paths.

What does this tool do?

With this tool, you can explore skills, occupations, knowledge and core skills by navigating the tabs on the top bar of the website or the links on the left hand side. These are identified by the blue boxes in the screenshot below.

SSC Explorer home page showing navigation tabs and search interface

Home

Under the 'home' tab, you can use the intelligent search to explore this prototype version of the UK Standard Skills Classification, filtering for:

  • Skills
  • Knowledge
  • Occupations
  • Core skills

For example, a search for 'welding' will bring up results for skills such as 'Perform tungsten inert gas (TIG) welding' and 'Perform shielded metal arc welding (SMAW)', knowledge areas like 'Spot Welding Machines', and occupations such as 'Other welding trades'.

Skills

Under the 'skills' tab you can explore all skills at the most detailed level of the classification, or at more aggregated levels (skill groups, areas or domains) or industry sectors. For example, filtering by the domain 'Programming & Implementing (Digital Tools & Systems)' displays the 170 skills within this domain. The dynamic filtering allows you to narrow down your search further to the relevant area eg 'Developing and deploying applications', group eg 'Code using different programming languages' and industry sector eg 'Web portals' to display the 5 most relevant skills. You can then click on each of the skills to explore them further.

Occupations

Under the 'occupations' tab you can explore all occupations at the most detailed level of the 2020 version of the Standard Occupational Classification, or by job groups and Sector Subject Areas (SSA).

For example, filtering by the job group 'Caring Personal Service Occupations' and the SSA 'Health and social care' returns 28 occupations such as 'Home care workers' and 'Residential care workers'.

Knowledge

Under the 'knowledge' tab you can explore knowledge by search, or by SSA and concept types. For example, filtering by the SSA 'Engineering' and concept type of 'Subject' returns 96 knowledge subject concepts and adding the further search term of 'electrical engineering' to the search box returns 8 knowledge subject concepts including 'Electrical Engineering' and 'Computer Engineering'.

Core Skills

Under the 'core skills' tab you can explore core skills by the essential foundational abilities that underpin various skills and occupations.

The categories are:

  • Planning and organising
  • Adapting
  • Working with others
  • Listening
  • Speaking
  • Leadership
  • Learning and investing
  • Creating
  • Problem solving and decision making
  • Numeracy
  • Digital literacy
  • Reading
  • Writing

Signup

You can also create an account that allows you to:

  • Create and compare custom skill lists
  • Provide feedback on SSC content
  • Download prototype dataset files

Supplemental Datasets

This tool uses additional mappings to improve the experience of browsing and navigating the classification. These are experimental and are therefore not available as downloads in the Download data files page or by request.

A. Mappings to Sector Subject Area (SSA)

  1. Knowledge to SSA: these were drawn from the existing mapping from the Learn Direct Classification of Subject Codes, where subjects have a direct mapping to an SSC knowledge concept. The remainder were generated using AI.
  2. Qualification to SSA: these were drawn from the Ofqual Register of Regulated Qualifications and the Skills England Apprenticeship Finder where available. For the remainder, including Higher Education qualifications, they were generated using AI. These SSAs should not be used in place of published data. They are developed for use by the Skills Explorer tool on the Skills, Occupations and Knowledge pages to enable filtering of potentially related qualifications by SSA.
  3. Occupations to SSA: These were AI generated.

The AI generated mappings to SSA were created by comparing the meaning of the knowledge, qualification or occupation labels and descriptions, with the meaning of the SSA title to identify potential links. These potential links were then evaluated by AI using a prompt to select the best matches for a UK context.

B. Additional occupation mappings

  1. Occupation to occupation relatedness: To identify potential links between occupations and other occupations, AI (text embedding vectors) were used to compare the meaning of the occupation title and a combined list of the SSC skills linked to each occupation against the corresponding list of title and SSC skills for all the other 1183 occupations. The top 10 closest matches (sharing at least two SSC skills) are displayed on the occupation page in the section 'Related Occupations'.
  2. Occupations to qualifications: To identify potential links between occupations and qualifications, AI compared the meaning of a combined list of SSC skills linked to each qualification, with the meaning of a combined list of SSC skills linked to each occupation. These potential links were then evaluated by AI using a prompt to select the best matches for a UK context.

Contact us

For queries about the content of the SSC, please contact [email protected].

For technical queries regarding the UK Skills Explorer tool, please contact [email protected].