SkillsDBvsLightcast
Lightcast maps the external labor market. SkillsDB maps your internal workforce — what skills your people actually have today, and how to develop them.
Feature Comparison
About Lightcast
Lightcast (formerly Emsi Burning Glass) is the reference source for labor market intelligence. The company states more than 18 billion data points drawn from job postings, professional profiles, and government statistics, covering 165 countries that represent 99 percent of world GDP. Lightcast provides skills taxonomies, labor market analytics, compensation benchmarking, talent supply/demand analysis, and workforce planning data. They serve enterprises, staffing firms, education institutions, and economic development organizations.
But labor market intelligence tells you what the market demands — not what your people can actually do. SkillsDB provides the internal counterpart: assessed proficiency across your workforce, so your planning is grounded in both external demand and internal reality.
Where Lightcast Is Strong
Lightcast is the reference dataset for the labor market. The company states more than 18 billion data points drawn from job postings, professional profiles, and government statistics, coverage of 165 countries representing 99 percent of world GDP, and more than 25 years of aggregating that data. Its products span the Analyst platform and its modules, Talent Analyst, Career Coach, Labour Insight, Talent Transform, and API delivery, serving enterprise, education, and public-sector buyers. When you need to know what a skill is worth in a metro, which titles are hiring for it, or how demand has shifted over five years, this is where the industry looks.
Its skills taxonomy is also widely adopted as a common language for describing external demand. For workforce planners, economic developers, and program designers in education, having every posting and profile mapped to the same open vocabulary is the point. Lightcast displays ISO, GDPR, CCPA, and TX-RAMP compliance on its site. It does not claim, and does not offer, an internal employee assessment product.
Where the Approaches Diverge
The first divergence is that Lightcast measures the market and SkillsDB measures your people. A Lightcast skill is a demand signal aggregated from millions of postings. A SkillsDB skill on a person's record is a graded level on an anchored scale, with the method that produced it, a trained date, and an expiry where the skill decays. SkillsDB can bootstrap that record from imported or inferred data and can align its library to an external taxonomy, but the record only becomes useful once it is assessed. Market data tells you what is valued; assessment tells you where you actually stand. Skills Assessment covers the methods.
The second divergence is the unit of analysis. Lightcast works in aggregates: occupations, regions, skill clusters, salary bands. SkillsDB runs the operating record at the level of one person and one skill: a competency framework in your own language, assessments against it, gaps per person and role, a training matrix that runs on trained dates and expiries, development plans that target a level, and succession views. A market dataset cannot tell a shift lead who is qualified on tonight's procedure, and it is not trying to.
The third divergence is where each is bought. Lightcast is a data and analytics purchase, often by strategy, workforce planning, or economic-development teams, delivered through platforms and APIs. SkillsDB is a system people log into daily: SOC 2 Type II certified, GDPR compliant, GraphQL API with SSO and SCIM, multi-language support, deployed where competence has to be measured and defended. See Skills Intelligence Platform for the five capabilities and how market data feeds them.
Who Should Choose Which
- Choose Lightcast if the question is external: what skills the market is paying for, where talent supply sits, and how a role's requirements are shifting.
- Choose Lightcast if you design education or workforce-development programs against labor demand, or benchmark compensation and talent supply across regions.
- Choose Lightcast if you need a common external skills vocabulary to describe postings, profiles, and occupations.
- Choose SkillsDB if you need graded, dated proficiency per person that feeds gap analysis, training matrices, and development plans.
- Choose SkillsDB if any part of the workforce is regulated or safety-critical and competence must be evidenced against a revision and an expiry.
- Choose SkillsDB if you want your competency framework in your own language, mapped to your roles, with market data as an input rather than the model.
Running Both
This is a natural pairing rather than a choice. Lightcast tells you which skills are rising in your industry and region and what they cost to hire; SkillsDB tells you, person by person, who holds them today and at what level, and runs the development plans that close the gap. Market data sets the target; assessed data measures the distance to it. Organizations that run both stop debating whether a gap exists and start debating how to close it.
Integration runs through the APIs. Lightcast skills and demand signals can inform the SkillsDB library and role requirements; assessed levels, trained dates, and gaps flow out of SkillsDB to the HCM or planning layer. Skills Inventory describes what the per-person record has to hold for the two to reconcile.
What to Ask in an Evaluation
- Which questions are external (market demand, supply, pay) and which are internal (who can do this today, at what level)? Buy for each.
- Can the internal system hold a proficiency level per person per skill with method, date, and expiry?
- Can our competency framework be written in our language and still map to an external taxonomy for benchmarking?
- Can I list everyone currently qualified for a role against the current revision, with evidence, without a spreadsheet?
- How do the two systems exchange role requirements and skill records, and who owns the mapping?
- What does each vendor claim about data provenance, and can it be audited?
Why Teams Choose SkillsDB
Internal Reality, Not Just External Trends
Lightcast tells you what the labor market demands. SkillsDB tells you what your workforce can actually deliver — assessed proficiency, verified gaps, real development progress. You need both to plan, but you can’t develop what you haven’t measured.
Develop, Not Just Analyze
Market data informs strategy. But strategy without execution is a slide deck. SkillsDB gives you the tools to actually close gaps — assessments, learning plans, career pathways, certification tracking, and measurable proficiency growth.
Every Employee, Assessed
Lightcast works with aggregated market data. SkillsDB works with individual employee proficiency — manager grades, self-assessments, benchmarks, and development plans. The internal ground truth that makes workforce planning actionable.
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