Data Sources

The O*NET program (USDOL/ETA) publishes the canonical SOC occupation taxonomy plus rich metadata for ~900 occupations — alternate titles, task lists, knowledge, skills, abilities, work activities, work context, and worker characteristics — sourced from incumbent surveys and occupational analysts.

SkillsAPI loads the latest O*NET vintage (28.3) and re-normalises it against the BLS SOC 2018 codes. Every /v1/occupations/* endpoint that returns skill, knowledge, or ability data ultimately reads from O*NET.

This application incorporates information from O*NET Web Services by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA). O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA.

ESCO is the European multilingual classification of Skills, Competences and Occupations published by the European Commission. It covers ~3,000 occupations and ~13,000 skills mapped to ISCO-08, with translations for all 24 EU official languages.

SkillsAPI loads ESCO v1.1.1 and exposes a cross-walk between O*NET SOC codes and ESCO occupation IDs on every occupation profile, so callers building EU-facing products get a single semantic model that works across both ecosystems.

Lightcast (formerly Burning Glass / Emsi Burning Glass) maintains an Open Skills taxonomy of ~32,000 skills derived from real-time labor market data — millions of online job postings, resumes, and worker profiles. The taxonomy is updated weekly and is the de facto standard for talent intelligence platforms.

SkillsAPI uses Lightcast Open Skills as the secondary skill ontology, complementing the academic / formal taxonomies of O*NET and ESCO with the long tail of emerging skills (e.g. *LangChain*, *Rust async*, *vector databases*) that show up in job postings before they're picked up by official surveys.

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the Standard Occupational Classification (SOC) — the federal statistical standard used to classify workers into occupational categories. The 2018 revision contains 867 detailed occupations grouped into 23 major groups.

SkillsAPI uses BLS SOC 2018 as the primary occupation key. Every occupation in the API has a SOC code, and the /v1/occupations/by-soc/{code} endpoint provides a stable canonical lookup that won't drift across O*NET vintage upgrades.

All data is EU-hosted on Hetzner Falkenstein. No PII is logged, GDPR compliant, no warranty — see the footer for the full legal boilerplate.