Skills Taxonomy
A common language for talent.
A structured skills classification system that connects organisational strategy to individual capability — enabling consistent hiring, development, and succession decisions across the business.
The problem
Scaling without a clear skills framework.
As organisations expand, the lack of a structured approach to skills creates compounding problems — inconsistent hiring, ineffective development, and succession plans that lack the specificity needed to be actionable.
- No authoritative source defining the skills required for each role
- Managers and HR use different language to describe the same capabilities
- Hiring and development decisions are based on incomplete or inconsistent criteria
- Succession plans lack the specificity needed to be actionable
Why it is critical
Align talent with business needs
Ensures the right skills are identified and deployed across the organisation — linking individual capability to strategic priorities.
Targeted development
Makes it easier to address skill gaps while creating clear development pathways for employees at every level.
Agility and workforce planning
Helps businesses adapt to change by providing a clear picture of current capabilities and future skill requirements.
Framework principles
Equipping your workforce with the skills to drive performance.
Six principles guide the design and application of the Peopletree Skills Taxonomy — ensuring it is practical, scalable, and directly connected to business outcomes.
Act as an Enabler
Designed to empower employees, line managers and HR - not to constrain them. The framework provides structure and content for application by many types of users across the organisation.
Define Competence
Competence is the demonstrated ability to deploy and apply knowledge, skills and behaviour for achieving observable business results. This definition anchors every element of the taxonomy.
Agile and Flexible
Decoupled from organisational structure to create agility. The framework represents a holistic view of all capabilities required within the business - regardless of how they are currently deployed.
Future Ready
Today's organisational structure may not reflect tomorrow's needs. The taxonomy creates a capabilities view agnostic to current deployment, ensuring flexibility for future alignment.
Master List
Intended as a master list from which various capabilities may be combined in different ways to create a picture of success within different functions, teams or jobs.
Practical Application
Designed for practical application, enabling users to adapt and apply it seamlessly across roles, teams and functions to meet real-world business needs.
Skills in context
From roles to individual skills.
Skills exist in layers. The framework connects the formal job title in the HR system to the actual responsibilities of the role, the knowledge areas required to fulfil those responsibilities, and the specific technical skills that make up each capability.
The formal job title in the HR system
The actual responsibilities and activities the person performs
The knowledge areas applied to fulfil the role responsibilities
The specific technical items that make up each capability
Source: The Josh Bersin Company, 2022
Framework structure
Two types of competence, three proficiency levels.
The framework distinguishes between technical skills (what a person knows) and behavioural competencies (how a person acts) — each measured on a different scale.
Technical Skills
Technical knowledge is the understanding of ideas, facts, and principles in a specific domain. It is assessed on a three-level proficiency scale.
Behavioural Competencies
Behavioural competencies are discussed or assessed using a five-level effectiveness scale — from Emerging to Mastery.
The three proficiency levels
Basic
Has had to interact with others who have this knowledge in order to accomplish their own work. Understands the terminology and can engage meaningfully with subject matter experts.
Intermediate
Uses this area of knowledge to get work done, or has used it previously and kept up to date in this field. Can apply the knowledge independently in familiar situations.
Advanced
Deep knowledge of this area; considered a subject matter expert by others. Expert knowledge is backed by high-level qualifications or significant experience. Unlikely that any one person is expert in more than 10 different areas.
These proficiency levels and their definitions remain consistent across all 20 knowledge domains — ensuring comparability across roles, functions, and business units.
Types of knowledge
Three sizes of technical knowledge.
Technical knowledge can be identified and grouped at three levels of specificity — from broad business knowledge to highly specialised domain expertise.
General Business Knowledge
Required across functions and differentiates the level of business acumen expected at different seniority levels.
Functional Knowledge
Required within a specific function. Functional knowledge defines what a person in a given discipline needs to know to perform effectively.
Specialised Knowledge
Required when a function is large, complex, or core to the business. Specialised knowledge goes deeper than functional knowledge into specific technical sub-domains.
Knowledge domains
20 domains, 500 skills.
The framework is divided into 20 knowledge domains — each containing multiple knowledge areas and hundreds of individual technical skills.
Contain knowledge areas required across the business — applicable to multiple functions and seniority levels.
Contain skills specific to a domain of expertise or business function — required for effective performance within that discipline.
Emerging Skills
An additional category cataloguing skills not currently mapped to a domain — including new technologies, evolving practices, and emerging capabilities.
The business case
Why the investment pays off.
Role clarity at scale
A structured skills taxonomy ensures clarity on role expectations, helping employees and managers understand what is required for success - without ambiguity.
Strategic workforce planning
Workforce planning becomes data-driven, allowing organisations to identify skills gaps and optimise training resources based on evidence rather than assumption.
Reduced hiring costs
By leveraging existing talent more effectively, businesses can reduce external hiring costs and enhance career development opportunities for current employees.
A common skills language
A shared skills vocabulary improves communication and decision-making, ensuring consistency across teams and creating a foundation for internal mobility.
Our approach
A structured, scalable approach.
Defining, implementing, and sustaining a skills framework requires more than a list of competencies. Our approach combines research-based content with contextualisation for your business.
Research-Based Master List
We start with a proven, research-based skills taxonomy developed by Peopletree Group, ensuring a strong foundation of industry-aligned capabilities across all major knowledge domains.
Contextualised for Your Business
We refine and scale the framework to match your organisation's needs, ensuring the right level of detail - whether for specialised functions or broader business units.
Knowledge Transfer and Training
We equip your HR team with the tools and knowledge to modify and evolve the skills framework over time, ensuring long-term usability and relevance as the business grows.
Draft Success Profiles
We deliver a set of draft success profiles, providing a practical starting point for defining roles and competencies that drive business performance.
Skills Taxonomy in Practice
A national retail bank partnered with Peopletree Group to build a skills taxonomy covering all 1,200 roles across their business — from branch operations to corporate functions.
We developed a customised skills taxonomy mapping 500+ skills across 20 knowledge domains, contextualised to the bank's operating model and integrated with their existing HR systems.
Part of the ecosystem
The Skills Taxonomy and Talent Genome work together.
The Skills Taxonomy covers technical knowledge — what a person knows. The Talent Genome covers behavioural competencies — how a person acts. Together, they provide a complete picture of individual capability.
What a person knows — 500 technical skills across 20 knowledge domains.
How a person behaves — 60 behavioural competencies across 18 clusters.
What the organisation needs — translates strategy into the capabilities required to execute it.
Ready to build your skills framework?
Start with our validated Skills Taxonomy and adapt it to your organisation's context — with expert support from the Peopletree team.