SANTA MONICA, CALIF. — September 13th, 2022 — SumTotal Systems, a Cornerstone company and a global leader in talent acquisition, onboarding, learning management, and talent management solutions today announced it has launched its Skills Blueprint product add-on in partnership with Lightcast, a leader in labor market analytics. This partnership will supercharge upskilling, reskilling, and talent development efforts for SumTotal customers.​

“We have developed Skills Blueprint in partnership with Lightcast, at a time when highly regulated enterprises and their learners have an unprecedented need for accessing comprehensive and accurate data,” said Jim Gill, Executive Vice President & General Manager SumTotal. “Paired with SumTotal’s existing skill-based functionality, Lightcast data will elevate how SumTotal customers identify, partner with, and grow talent across their workforce​.”

“Lightcast's data within Skills Blueprint will provide people and organizations with actionable insights on the marketplace for skills,” said Pete Massar, VP Lightcast Partnerships. “That cleareyed view of the value, supply, and demand for skills will ensure that talent and opportunity have a well-lit path to each other.”

Skills Blueprint will provide SumTotal customers with market-level analytics around jobs and skills. This market data will help SumTotal customers streamline the rollout of talent development solutions, including internal mobility and career development functionality; this data is immediately relevant and updated in real time. ​Powered by Lightcast, SumTotal customers can easily enhance their internal skills data based on a market-validated skill taxonomy, allowing for faster gap analysis and more focused development efforts.

Using Skills Blueprint to build or enhance internal skill data unlocks expansive capabilities, including:

• Building a Future-Proof, Competitive Workforce: Market-informed job and skill data provide a competitive edge to all levels of an organization. With access to job data from Lightcast, stakeholders gain an unmatched level of insight needed to support agile, efficient, on-the-spot decision-making, driving profitability across the organization. Managers and leaders can build more robust and competitive job profiles to develop high-performing teams and power employee upskilling, while individual contributors can gain visibility into market-informed career options to discover new opportunities based on their acquired skills and interests.
• Improve Delivery of Learning & Development: Taking a skills-based approach and targeting training to fill specific skill gaps, organizations can maximize ROI on their training investments by leveraging content as a development opportunity. For example, if a company requires new developers to take coding courses, it can then reframe these resources as learnings for other employees. This ensures organizations don’t waste resources where proficiency exists and is already validated.
• Smarter Resource Allocation: A skills-based approach enhances resource allocation activities by empowering organizations to pair the right resource with the right skill set to meet the needs of a specific engagement. By starting with skills, an organization can define required capabilities at a granular level. These skills are then mapped to employees to identify strengths and areas of improvement. Organizations that leverage a skills taxonomy and a skills-based approach to resource allocation are sure to see better outcomes, increased staff satisfaction, and improved customer satisfaction.
• Enhance Employee Mobility & Retention: A skills-based approach breaks down the concept of the “vertical career path,” along with “role-based” or “team-based” projects. As a result, employees can move more freely around an organization and are able to access informal and formal opportunities that would not have existed before, leading to increased employee retention and greater organizational effectiveness.

This new market comparison tool underscores SumTotal’s commitment to providing you with powerful data to make more informed decisions. Skills Blueprint will seamlessly integrate into existing skill functionality, to help you start, improve, or modernize your skills taxonomy in real time. Implementation of Skills Blueprint will be initially available from November 2022.

More information on SumTotal’s Skills Blueprint can be found on the SumTotal Marketplace which provides easy access to solutions built by SumTotal and its software and content partners.

About SumTotal
SumTotal, part of Cornerstone, provides a unified, comprehensive Learning and Talent Development suite that delivers measurable impact across the entire employee lifecycle. With SumTotal, organizations can build a culture of learning that is critical to growth, success, and business sustainability. SumTotal’s award-winning technology provides talent acquisition, onboarding, learning management, and talent management solutions across some of the most innovative, complex, and highly regulated industries, including technology, airlines, financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and pharmaceuticals.

SumTotal partners with many leading global organizations, including a number of Fortune 500 companies. SumTotal’s Talent Development suite supports learning and talent management initiatives for their customers and offers measurable impact across the entire employee lifecycle. Learn more at www.sumtotalsystems.com.

About Lightcast
Lightcast provides trusted global labor market data, analytics, and expert guidance that empowers communities, corporations, and learning providers to make informed decisions and navigate the increasingly complex world of work. With a database of more than one billion job postings and career profiles, our team provides best-in-class customer service with robust data, clear analysis, and expert guidance on skills, jobs, and opportunities. Headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts, and Moscow, Idaho, Lightcast is active in more than 30 countries and has offices in the United Kingdom, Italy, New Zealand, and India. The company is backed by global private equity leader KKR. For more at www.lightcast.io.

About Cornerstone
Cornerstone powers the future-ready workforce with adaptive HR solutions designed to unite technology, data and content and inspire a work environment of growth, agility and success for all. With an AI-powered, skills-forward, experiential system designed for the contemporary workforce, we help organizations modernize their learning and development experience, deliver the most relevant content from anywhere, accelerate talent and career mobility and establish skills as the universal language of growth and success across their business. Cornerstone serves over 7,000 customers and 90M users and is available in 180 countries and 50 languages. Learn more at www.csod.com.

Media
Jayne Forde Matthews
jayne.forde@skillsoft.com
j.fordematthews@csod.com