Merge duplicate skills and every profile that used them keeps working.
Duplicate skills can now be merged, and every profile and role that already used them keeps working. A skills catalogue can be tidied as it grows, with entries renamed or archived safely, suggested skills reviewed before they join and each marketplace deciding how tightly its own catalogue is controlled.
What changed in the skills catalogue
A skills catalogue is the shared list of skills that members, employers and roles are all described with, and it is what matching compares one against the other. Until now, cleaning one up meant archiving what you did not want and living with near-duplicates that were both genuinely in use. Merging closes that gap.
- Duplicate skills can be merged, and every profile and role that already used either one keeps its skill.
- Entries can be renamed or archived without breaking existing records.
- Suggested skills can be reviewed before they join your catalogue.
- Skill search is more forgiving, so people find the skill they mean without having to type it exactly.
- Each marketplace sets how tightly its own skills catalogue is controlled.
- Companies reuse the Spacewalk catalogue and add genuinely private competencies of their own, with onboarding, profiles, role creation, imports and matching all following the same rules.
Admins curate their own catalogue alongside the standard Spacewalk one, sorted into nine categories running from technical and domain through to certification and human language, and the word skills itself can be renamed to suit the community. Matching on your community's own vocabulary covers those ground rules. What is new is that the list can be maintained after the fact, at company level and at marketplace level.
What it means for your community
Members feel this as roles that find them. Matching compares each member's skills, work preferences and profile against the skills and requirements extracted from every role, so two spellings of one skill quietly split the pool in half. A member who picked one version stops seeing roles tagged with the other, and nobody involved can tell that is what happened.
A skills bootcamp starting a new cohort every few weeks is the clearest case. Tutors add the vocabulary their cohort uses, so Data Analysis, Data analytics and Analytics can all end up on the list inside a term. Merging pulls them back into one entry without asking a single learner to edit their profile, which matters because placement rate is what funders, learners and accreditors judge a bootcamp on. Bootcamps placing every cohort depend on matching that is not quietly leaking.
Niche talent pools have the same problem in a different accent. A tutoring organisation renames skills to subjects and matches tutors to briefs by hand until the pool outgrows that, and a tutor who typed GCSE Maths while the brief asks for Maths GCSE is a match nobody ever sees. More forgiving search means the member lands on the entry that already exists instead of suggesting another one, and the review step catches whatever still slips through before it reaches the catalogue. Tutoring providers matching tutors to briefs are built on exactly that.
What it means for your team
Maintenance stops being risky. Each skill shows how many roles and profiles use it, so you can see what a change will touch before you make it. A skill still in use is archived rather than deleted, renaming does not rewrite the roles and profiles carrying it and merging keeps both sides. Admins also choose which skills trigger match email alerts, so a tidier catalogue does not turn into a noisier inbox for members.
The marketplace-level control is the part that scales. A curator running a board with dozens of employers on it can decide how tightly the shared catalogue is held, so the vocabulary stays consistent across every company posting roles while each company keeps competencies that are genuinely private to it. The same rules then apply everywhere the catalogue is used, from the skills step new members complete as they join to the roles that arrive automatically through the job stream, where skills are extracted from the listing rather than typed by a person.
What happens to profiles and roles when two skills are merged?
Nothing is lost. Every profile and role that already used either skill keeps it after the merge, so a member never has to go back and re-edit a profile and a live role does not lose the requirement it was posted with. The same principle runs through the rest of the catalogue tools. Renaming an entry does not change the roles and profiles already carrying it, and a skill that is in use is archived rather than deleted, so it can be restored if it was retired too early. That is the whole of the note on tidying a catalogue without breaking what exists.
Getting started
The catalogue sits in the Skills area under Manage Company, where every entry shows its category and its usage before you change anything. How tightly the shared list is held is a marketplace decision rather than a company one, and the entry on catalogues shaped around your marketplace describes what that covers. The marketplace admin guide walks through adding and categorising skills, and the knowledge base covers what happens to skills already in use. Spacewalk runs a 14-day free trial with no credit card required and a 30-day money-back guarantee, and a board goes live in about an hour.