Disclosed in some examples are systems, methods, and machine readable mediums which allow for the automatic creation of a skills hierarchy. The skills hierarchy comprises an organization of a standardized list of skills into a hierarchy that describes category relationships between the skills in the hierarchy. The category relationships may include no relationships, parent relationships, and child relationships. A skill may be considered a parent of another skill if the parent skill describes a broader category of skill that includes the child. Other relationships such as grandparent (e.g., a parent's parent), great-grandparent, grandchild, great grandchild and so on may be defined inferentially as well. In some examples, the constructed hierarchy may be organized with broader skills at higher levels and narrower skills at lower levels.