For most companies, employees are the biggest expense (and asset). But how companies invest in those employees can quickly become disjointed. If the job description, interviewing process, onboarding, performance management, and career pathing aren\u2019t in sync, you create a mess. It reminds me of coaching my daughter’s soccer team: I yell for kids to stay in their positions and the parents yell \u201cGo get the ball!\u201d The result is chaos and confusion. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Taxonomies create a shared understanding <\/strong>of what\u2019s important. Companies use taxonomies to organize resources (discovery), connect people to opportunities (matching), and align activity to insights (reporting). Taxonomies can align each part of the talent lifecycle. As HR expert Dave Ulrich says<\/a>: \u201cEvery discipline, to become a sustainable science, uses systematics (classification of separate items into common groups) to create taxonomies (types of things that go together) to make progress.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n Taxonomies<\/strong> make the ambiguous actionable<\/strong>. Has a business leader told employees to \u201cimprove your business acumen\u201d and left them wondering what that even means? Are there roles your people are interested in but they don\u2019t know the steps needed to get those roles? Taxonomies can help. Taxonomies break complex ideas or challenges into smaller, more actionable steps.<\/p>\n\n\n\n First, let\u2019s create a skill taxonomy for a fairly generic role using AI. This taxonomy could serve as the backbone for writing job descriptions, guiding interview questions, building training programs, and helping form the criteria for performance management conversations. We\u2019ll do this one as a video so you can see the process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/explore.degreed.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/5_7_24_Expirements-2_Blog-in-post-1-1024x576.png\")
<\/figure>\n\n\n\nExperiment No. 1: Skills Taxonomy for a Generic Role<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n\n\n