Why

A chess player already knows how to make a decision under a clock. Most job applications never ask.

More than 75 million American workers have skills employers need right now, built through community college, the military, training programs, on-the-job work and life. Opportunity@Work calls them STARs: Skilled Through Alternative Routes. They are half of the U.S. workforce.^[1]

What stands between them and the work is the paper ceiling: degree screens, biased algorithms, stereotypes, exclusive networks and personal referrals.^[3] Between 2000 and 2020, STARs lost access to 7.5 million middle- and high-wage jobs.^[2] Workday's write-up of its documentary UNTAPPED puts the screen in plain numbers: requiring a four-year degree automatically screens out more than 70% of Black adult Americans and 80% of Hispanic adult Americans.^[4]

The fix is to hire for skills. But skills-based hiring needs a skills vocabulary, and most people have never been handed one. They know what they do. They rarely know what hiring calls it.

That is the gap Transposition fills. The idea started with chess. Reading through the paper ceiling material, I kept thinking about the chess player who has never held a strategy job but has spent years choosing one move from many under a clock, testing every option against the best reply, and reviewing every loss move by move. That is Judgment and Decision Making, Critical Thinking and Active Learning, by name. The same is true of the youth coach, the church organizer, the caregiver running a household and the musician teaching a first song.

In chess, a transposition reaches the same position by a different move order. That is the whole idea.

Different moves. Same position.

Transposition translates what you do into the skill names the U.S. Department of Labor uses to describe every occupation (O*NET), then shows the occupations those skills already fit and links you straight to the openings.^[5]

No AI. Every match shows its math. You can see which of your interests built which skill, how much each one counted and why an occupation ranks where it does. Nothing is guessed, generated or stored. Every weight is published on How it works, and if one looks wrong, it can be changed.

Transposition is a starting point, not a credential. It gives you the words for a resume line and a search, and the confidence that the skills you built off the clock count.

Transposition is an independent project. It is not affiliated with or endorsed by the U.S. Department of Labor, O*NET, Opportunity@Work, Workday or any employer.