Skills Framework
Create a common skills language for better workforce decisions.
Peopletree Group's Skills Taxonomy gives organisations a practical foundation for understanding capability across roles, teams, and business units. Built from a structured library of 500+ skills and tailored to your context.
The problem
Most organisations cannot answer the most basic question about their workforce.
What skills do we actually have? What do we need? Where is the gap?
Without a shared skills language, every manager, recruiter, and HR business partner applies their own definition of capability. Hiring decisions vary. Development plans miss the mark. Workforce planning is built on incomplete information.
Skills data is spread across CVs, job descriptions, HR systems, and learning platforms - each with its own definition of what a skill means. There is no single source of truth.
Every manager applies their own standard. Hiring, promotion, and development decisions vary by team, by leader, and by moment - and are hard to audit or defend.
Workforce planning requires answers to three questions: what skills do we have, what do we need, and where is the gap. Most organisations cannot answer any of them with confidence.
Internal mobility depends on a clear connection between what someone can do and what a role requires. Without a shared skills language, that connection is invisible.
What it does
A shared skills language for the whole organisation.
Peopletree Group's Skills Taxonomy is built from a structured library of 500+ skills, giving organisations a practical foundation for understanding capability across roles, teams, and business units. It defines what technical knowledge looks like at every level - so that hiring, development, succession, and mobility decisions are grounded in a consistent, organisation-wide standard.
"A skills taxonomy is the foundation that makes talent decisions - hiring, development, succession, mobility - more reliable and more defensible."
Where it creates value
Six workforce decisions the Skills Taxonomy supports.
A well-designed skills taxonomy is not a standalone deliverable. It is the foundation that makes every other talent decision more reliable.
Skills visibility
Give leaders and HR a clear, consistent view of what capability exists across the organisation - verified through structured assessment and captured in a single system.
Skills AuditGap analysis
Identify where capability is strong, where it needs development, and where it is absent. Use that picture to prioritise hiring and development investment.
Skills AuditWorkforce planning
Understand the skills your organisation needs in 12, 24, and 36 months. Build a workforce plan on evidence - capability data, gap trends, and role demand.
DataHubTalent mobility
Match people to roles based on verified capability. A shared skills language makes internal mobility practical, consistent, and visible to both managers and employees.
TalentProfileSuccession and development
Define the technical capability required for every critical role. Use that definition to identify successors, build development plans, and track readiness over time.
Succession ManagementAnalytics and reporting
Skills data becomes a strategic input for people analytics - enabling dashboards on capability distribution, gap trends, and training ROI.
DataWizHow we apply it
The foundation is proven. The application is tailored.
We do not apply the Skills Taxonomy as a generic template. We adapt it to your organisation's context, role architecture, and strategic priorities - so the result is a skills language your business will actually use.
Start with a proven foundation
Peopletree Group's Skills Taxonomy is built from a structured library of 500+ skills - a research-based foundation that gives every engagement a strong, proven starting point.
Tailor it to your context
We adapt the foundation to your organisation's role architecture, strategic priorities, and industry context - working with your HR team and business leaders to define what capability means in your environment.
Build Success Profiles
We translate the tailored taxonomy into Success Profiles for each role level and function - giving managers and HR a clear, consistent definition of what good looks like.
Success ProfilesLoad into the platform
The taxonomy and Success Profiles are loaded into TalentProfile and TalentPrint, making skills data searchable, assessable, and actionable across the organisation.
TalentProfileNatural next step
The Skills Taxonomy is the foundation for a Skills Audit.
The Skills Taxonomy provides the foundation for a Skills Audit - helping organisations assess current capability, identify gaps, and prioritise action across development, mobility, succession, and workforce planning.
Defines the shared skills language - what capability looks like across roles, levels, and functions.
Applies the taxonomy to assess current capability - giving the organisation a verified, data-driven view of where it stands.
Development, mobility, succession, workforce planning, and analytics - all grounded in consistent, trusted skills data.
Common questions
Skills taxonomy - frequently asked questions.
A skills taxonomy is a structured classification of the technical knowledge and capabilities required across roles in an organisation. It creates a shared language for describing capability - so that hiring, development, succession, and workforce planning decisions are based on consistent definitions rather than individual interpretation.
A competency framework describes how people behave - the behavioural patterns that drive performance. A skills taxonomy describes what people know - the technical knowledge and domain expertise required to do a job. Both are needed for a complete picture of workforce capability. Peopletree Group's Talent Genome covers behavioural competencies; the Skills Taxonomy covers technical knowledge.
No. Peopletree Group's Skills Taxonomy is built from a structured library of 500+ skills, giving organisations a proven starting point. We tailor this foundation to your organisation's context, role architecture, and strategic priorities.
A well-designed skills taxonomy supports skills gap analysis, workforce planning, talent identification, succession planning, internal mobility, learning and development prioritisation, and people analytics - all grounded in a consistent, organisation-wide definition of capability.
The Skills Taxonomy defines the technical capability framework. TalentProfile captures each employee's skills, experience, and career history against that framework. TalentPrint assesses behavioural competency alongside it. Together, they give the organisation a complete view of individual and collective capability.
A Success Profile defines what good looks like for a specific role - combining the behavioural competencies from the Talent Genome with the technical knowledge requirements from the Skills Taxonomy. It gives managers and HR a clear, consistent benchmark for hiring, development, and succession decisions.
A tailored skills taxonomy and initial set of Success Profiles can typically be delivered within 4 to 8 weeks, depending on the scope of roles covered and the complexity of the organisation's role architecture. Implementation is faster when the organisation already has defined job families or a clear role hierarchy.
Part of the ecosystem
The Skills Taxonomy and Talent Genome work together.
The Skills Taxonomy defines technical knowledge requirements across roles. The Talent Genome defines the behavioural competencies that drive performance. Both are integrated into TalentPrint and TalentProfile, giving the organisation a complete and consistent view of individual and collective capability.
Technical knowledge requirements across roles - a structured foundation of 500+ skills, tailored to your organisation's context.
Skills AuditBehavioural competencies that predict performance - 60 competencies across 18 clusters, assessed through TalentPrint.
Talent GenomeOrganisational capability requirements - translates strategy into the skills and behaviours that define competitive advantage.
Org GenomeNext step
Ready to build a shared skills language?
Start with Peopletree Group's structured skills foundation and adapt it to your organisation's context, roles, and strategic priorities.