In my talk at Come To Code 2025 about Advancing Your Career with Open Source, I mentioned the SKILLAB Project. Afterwards, I started thinking that this project is worth some more attention in form of a blog post. This is the result. I hope you will like it.
SKILLAB is a project funded by the European Union. It is aiming to map the skills in supply/demand for job seekers in the EU. The project aims to identify gaps in skills between what the market demands and what the potential workforce can offer. The data gathered can be used to support businesses and recruiters when searching for specific skills.
What intrigues me the most with the SKILLAB project is the possibilities it gives for the open source projects and communities. A common challenge for open source projects is to find new contributors and committers. Where can they find new people that potentially could contribute to the project? And the other way around, how can someone interested in starting a path of contributing to open source identify which project to start with?
This is where SKILLAB comes in. Let’s say that someone who is looking for a job or a new role discovers that they lack a certain skill or skill set for the desired role or position. The algorithms of SKILLAB could then suggest possible open source projects that are looking for help that would help the candidate acquire those skills.
This is a win-win situation.
The open source project and community gets a new contributor, and the contributor acquires the skills needed for the desired new position or role by contributing to the project.
This is kind of the opposite of what the Open Source Communities pilot case is about, but at the same time it is the same data used, so one does not exclude the other.
In addition to the SKILLAB web pages, you can also find information about the project on the Eclipse Foundation project page for SKILLAB.
