A skills classification system is configured to calculate, for a skill from the skills database, industry-specific probabilities for the industries associated with the skill. An industry-specific probability for an industry with respect to a skill is the probability of that skill being a required skill for a job associated with that industry. The skills classification system also calculates an industry-agnostic probability with respect to that same skill, which is the probability of the skill being a required skills for any job regardless of the industry. Based on the distance between the set of industry-specific probabilities for the industries associated with the skill and the industry-agnostic probability, the skills classification system calculates a score for the skill. This score is used to determine whether the skill should be tagged with a soft skill identifier or a hard skill identifier.