We are taking this very seriously, but not because we are “me-too.” 

Allow me to explain.

What makes Skills Base so powerful, and what our engineering and tech-team customers keep telling us, is that they love our assessment model. We were the first and only skills management platform to create bespoke assessment logic that provides real skill facts on actual skill and skill level via our industry-leading “Structured-Subjective” model.

Structured Subjective democratizes the collection of skills data so it’s easy, fast, and accurate. Nothing else has the potential to deliver such accuracy.

This is contrasted sharply with a lot of others in the market who are now harnessing AI to scrape skill insights from LinkedIn, your job description, your HR system and other corporate applications. 

The problem with that, as we are seeing, is the old “rubbish in = rubbish out” problem.

Just because someone you have never met has given you a skills endorsement on LinkedIn, does that actually mean you are really any good at that skill? And, at what level of mastery do you possess said skill? All a bit flaky if you ask me. And if you ask our customers.

This is a key part of our specialty. In fact, we’ve dedicated our working lives to it at Skills Base, and so we give it a lot of thought and attention.

We specialize in helping Technology, Engineering, Manufacturing, Aerospace, and Life Sciences teams (to name a few) to quickly realize their actual skills, the level of those skills, and the skills gap. For our customers, this is mission-critical information. You need to know explicitly what the actual skill level is; it’s not something that can be inferred. In many cases, this can be life-and-death information so getting it right is very important.

Part of our promise is “Your skills, today”, and we take that very seriously.

We help customers to build a taxonomy, that is theirs. It’s their skills in their language, not an off-the-shelf skill cloud that might mean very little to the actual team members doing the work. It’s part of where we are now starting to incorporate AI, which can really streamline and accelerate this process. Whilst it is very convenient and has proven to really speed up the process of taxonomy creation, the use-case of AI here is not exactly earth-shattering. It’s something a lot of vendors are now doing.

But what we ARE doing, which is very different is to offer AI-built insights.

At that point, I am guessing many people will say, “But everyone is doing that!” Allow me to explain how this is different and especially powerful.

Firstly, and per the preceding comments about our industry-leading Structured-Subjective model, Skills Base sets itself apart for engineers and technical people by quickly providing the most accurate and reliable skills data that you can rely on.

But we also go beyond that. We are one of the only vendors that also assess interest level, skills, qualifications, and knowledge.

This leads me to my second point, Actual Verifiable and Strategically Aligned Insights.

This is really the nucleus of what makes us so excited about our direction of travel with AI and is something we will shortly, and uniquely, be able to offer our customers which is predicated on the accuracy of the data we collect and know about the skills of the teams and the organization at large.

By ingesting key strategic information on the organization, such as the strategic plan, and then aligning this with the detailed and granular skills data we hold, Skills Base will soon be able to revolutionize the way in which it powers our customers’ skills-based decision-making.

It’s simply next level.

Skills Base is all about attracting, optimizing and retaining skills.

Skills Base has historically been a great platform to help to form teams, support internal mobility, optimize and direct training and coaching initiatives, inform compensation plans, optimize project teams, and the like. AI will now turbo-charge this and also automatically align powerful insights you were not even aware of to your strategic direction, giving you real-time, extremely valuable data to make your organization more efficient, effective and competitive.

And what’s more, all of those customers who are already building taxonomies using our AI-powered skills library and assessing using our Structured-Subjective model will get these insights immediately. It really rewards the “get started now” movement that we have seen with many skills-based organizations over the last five years.

With all of this in mind, we’re excited to announce the Beta-2 release of our foundational skills intelligence engine and front-end natural language interface “Sam”. and new Skills Query Language.