Work Open Data
DraftA machine-readable representation of roles, skills and working relationships.
Purpose
Work Open Data is a machine-readable way to represent roles, skills, employment and the working relationships between a person and the organisations or clients they work with.
Scope
Covers self-asserted role and skill statements, employment relationships and delegation for recruitment or representation (a recruiter authorised to represent a candidate). It does not cover payroll, contracts, or performance data.
Motivation
A CV, a professional-network profile and an internal HR record all describe the same working history in incompatible formats, none of which the person themselves fully controls. Work Open Data gives that history a portable, verifiable shape that survives any one of those systems disappearing.
Guiding principles
- Roles and skills are self-statements: signed claims, graded by whatever evidence backs them, never presented as "verified" by default.
- A recruiter or agency representing a candidate is a delegation relationship, the same primitive used everywhere else in the model.
- The standard commoditises the data about work, not the judgement a recruiter or hiring manager brings to it.
Current status
Draft. No published technical specification yet, and no reference implementation beyond the general profile shape used across Open Data.
Repository
Not yet published.
Discussion
Not yet open. A discussion venue will be announced alongside the first published specification.