The Labour-Reality Framework
We don’t tell students what to be. We show them what’s observable.
Most career tools begin with a question about who a student is. MySkillGap begins with the work itself — the recurring problems that make a job exist, and the observable actions that solve them. Career exploration, no prestige hierarchy.
The evidence base cited on this page. Not partnerships, and not endorsements.
01 The problem
Career uncertainty is not indecision. It’s an information problem.
Young people are asked to choose between things they have never seen described. The decision is not being avoided — the information required to make it has never been put in front of them in a form they can act on.
of schools fully meet all eight Gatsby Benchmarks.
Careers & Enterprise Company
Gatsby Benchmark Results 2024/25
of first-year students do not know what they want to do after graduation.
HESA
Student Academic Experience Survey 2022
16–24-year-olds not in education, employment or training — 13.5% of the age group.
Office for National Statistics
NEET Statistics, May 2026
02 The framework
Two definitions, applied without exception.
They are strict on purpose. A definition that admits everything describes nothing, and a careers database that admits everything is a list of job titles with adjectives attached.
A job
A recurring role that exists to solve a specific type of problem within a system.
Not a title. Not a prestige ladder. A welder and a quantitative analyst are both answers to recurring problems, and that is the only frame the database uses.
A skill
An observable action someone performs repeatedly to solve real problems under real constraints.
Not a trait, a tool, a credential or a buzzword. “Communication” is not a skill. “Presenting analytical findings to a non-technical audience” is.
Can I picture someone doing it? Does it shape the daily feel of the job?
Every entry is held against both questions. If either answer is no, the line is rewritten until it is observable, or it does not go in. That filter is the product.
03 Bidirectional exploration
Read it in either direction.
A student who knows one thing they can already do walks in through the skill. A student who has only heard a job title walks in through the role. Both routes land in the same map.
Enter through a skill
Risk Assessment
Identifying, evaluating and prioritising risks — assessing likelihood and consequence systematically to determine where mitigation effort is needed most.
One action. Roles that look nothing like one another, in social work, engineering, security, planning, clinical practice and film.
Enter through a role
Civil Engineer
Engineering / Construction / Infrastructure. The role decomposed into the actions it actually requires, rather than the qualifications it advertises.
Risk Assessment appears on both sides. That is what makes the map a map, rather than two lists facing each other.
04 The platform
Roles. Skills. Tools. One map.
A working demonstration of the framework on a representative slice of the UK labour market. Open, no account required, and nothing about a visitor is profiled or stored.
05 Who it is for
Three ways in, one vocabulary underneath.
Schools & colleges
Evidence Benchmark 2 with something students use
A data-rich exploration tool that produces a record of what a cohort explored. Cohort-level insight only, and never a profile of an individual pupil.
For schools →Employers
Describe the work, not the CV
A shared vocabulary of observable actions, so a job advert says what the person will do. Fewer wrong hires, and a shorter route to the ones who can already do it.
For employers →Work experience
A placement that leaves a record
Students record the actions they performed on placement against the same vocabulary employers use — a verifiable account of what they did, not where they sat.
Work experience →06 Method
How an entry earns its place.
The database is not scraped and it is not generated. Every role, skill and tool in it is written against four rules, and anything that fails one is rewritten until it passes or it does not go in.
The inclusion test
Can I picture someone doing it? Does it shape the daily feel of the job? Both answers have to be yes.
Named as an action
A skill is written as something a person does, never as a trait, a tool, a credential or a buzzword. That is why the database has no entry called “communication”.
Sourced, not asserted
Externally-checkable facts are held to an authoritative source plus an independent one, recorded against the entry itself rather than in a bibliography at the back.
Cohort-level only
No individual profiling, no pathway locking, no outcome prediction. What a school gets back is what a cohort explored — never a judgement about a pupil.
07 Next
Start with a conversation, not a sign-up.
Pilot cohorts for the 2026/27 academic year are being arranged now. A first conversation is thirty minutes, and it is with the person who built this.