Manually mapping skills to jobs is the HR equivalent of doing your taxes by hand—slow, painful, and a task you put off until the last possible moment. Lightcast thinks it has the fix.
The labor market intelligence company today unveiled Skills Agent, a new automation engine baked into its Talent Transform platform. Its mission: kill off the spreadsheets and expensive consulting projects that have long bogged down skills-based workforce strategies.
From Static Job Lists to Live, Self-Updating Architectures
Most companies know they need to be “skills-based,” but in practice, keeping job profiles current is a mess. Deloitte reports only 17% of organizations feel confident in forecasting future skill needs, and many rely on quarterly audits—or worse, outdated skills libraries.
Skills Agent changes that by continuously updating skill-to-job associations in real time, drawing on Lightcast’s proprietary skills taxonomy—a database of 73,000 occupations and 34,000 validated skills used by over 6,000 organizations and 250 HR tech partners.
It works like this:
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Detects labor market shifts – Monitors emerging skills and industry changes.
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Benchmarks against global data – Compares internal roles to external trends.
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Recommends and justifies new skills for job profiles instantly.
The result? What used to take 2–4 hours per role—plus quarterly maintenance—now happens automatically, potentially saving large enterprises thousands of hours and up to $800,000 annually.
Built for HR at Scale
Lightcast’s pitch isn’t just speed—it’s governance and agility. Talent Transform standardizes job architectures across business units and geographies, ensuring a common language for roles while keeping up with shifting market demands.
Unlike rivals that rely purely on internal data inference, Lightcast blends external labor market intelligence with internal structures, providing context that helps HR leaders act on skills data rather than simply collect it.
ROI and Competitive Advantage
Lightcast claims 6–12x ROI in the first year thanks to reduced manual effort and consulting fees. The real strategic win, though, could be in redeployment, workforce planning, and internal mobility—areas where slow, outdated skills data typically stalls progress.
Mark Hanson, VP of Strategy at Lightcast, summed it up:
“This is not just faster—it’s smarter. And it gives our customers the confidence to act on skills data, not just collect it.”
What’s Next
Skills Agent is available now through Lightcast, Workday, and SAP marketplaces. A benchmarking upgrade—letting organizations compare their skills inventory to competitors, peers, and partners—is slated for October 2025.
In a market where skills can go obsolete in months, real-time updates might be the only way to keep HR strategy ahead of the curve. Or, as Lightcast is betting, to finally take “update job skills” off your quarterly panic list.
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