A new Youth Entrepreneurship Policy Academy report presents practical policy pointers to help bridge the gap between young people’s strong interest in entrepreneurship and the low number of successful start-ups.
This external research explores how artificial intelligence is transforming service delivery in public employment services from job matching and career guidance to labour market intelligence. The study highlights how integrating ESCO strengthens AI-driven tools, improving precision, interoperability, and comparability across systems and enabling more targeted support for jobseekers and employers. Find out more in the link below.
This external quantitative study analyses over 600,000 tweets to uncover how generative AI is reshaping human skills. By mapping real user requests to the ESCO taxonomy, the research provides the first large-scale evidence of how ChatGPT interacts with established labour-market competences highlighting strong links to content creation and problem-solving. Find out more in the link below.
This external research challenges common assumptions about “green jobs” by using ESCO and O*NET. The study reveals that only a minority of energy-transition occupations rely primarily on green skills, while digital competences play a far bigger role than expected. These findings raise important questions for policy, training and reskilling strategies in Europe’s transition to a low-carbon economy. Find out more in the link below.
A new European Social Policy Analysis Network report on homelessness and anti-poverty policies finds that common EU measures include affordable housing, eviction and debt prevention, and better access to services. The report calls for improved monitoring, closer alignment with anti-poverty strategies, and increased investment to close remaining gaps.
A new study highlights that universal welfare models best reduce poverty and maintain trust during crise. It urges stronger links between social and environmental policies to help welfare systems adapt to climate, economic, and political shocks.
This study identifies emerging challenges and opportunities in Europe’s labour markets, supporting the preparation for the upcoming Social Transformations and Resilience Partnership under Horizon Europe in 2027.
The PES Network has adopted an Opinion Paper in the context of the Commission's consultation on the new Action Plan to implement the European Pillar of Social Rights. You can still share your views by 10 September.
This paper revolves around addressing the increasing prevalence of long-term health conditions and rising healthcare costs in Europe through the establishment of Community-Based Interprofessional Teams (CBIT). It underscores the necessity for health and social care professionals (HSCP) in community primary care to possess specific transversal skills and competencies S&C to effectively collaborate and deliver care. ESCO is employed to categorise these essential SC into six clusters: Social and Communication, Self-Management, Thinking, Life, Core, and Physical/Manual SC. By synthesising findings from various qualitative studies, the research highlights the importance of Social and Communication skills, along with other competencies, in fostering effective teamwork and ethical practice. ESCO plays a pivotal role in structuring the competencies, providing a comprehensive basis for identifying relevant learning objectives that can enhance the effectiveness of CBIT in community primary care settings. You can read the full study on the portal.
This paper explores the key transversal skills and competencies needed by health and social care professionals working in community-based interprofessional teams. Using ESCO to classify these skills into six clusters, it highlights the importance of communication and teamwork for effective care delivery. Read the full study on the portal.
In this paper, the authors introduce JobHop, a large-scale public dataset derived from anonymised resumes provided by VDAB, the public employment service in Flanders, Belgium. Utilising Large Language Models (LLMs), the paper processes unstructured resume data to extract structured career information, which is then mapped to standardised ESCO occupation codes using a multi-label classification model. Discover the research paper on the portal.
The paper aims to analyse the distribution and intensity of digital skills across EU occupations and their impact on productivity and technological innovation. It emphasises that a skilled workforce is essential for effectively adopting digital technologies, as disparities in digital skills can impede economic growth. The study utilises the ESCO framework to measure digital skill requirements and compares three key indicators: the Digital Intensity Index (DII), Digital Competency Index (DCI), and Digital Skills Index (DSI). These indicators help quantify and compare digital skills across occupations, providing insights into their varying levels and implications for economic development and policy within the EU. Access the full study on the portal.
This study explores how digital skills are distributed across EU occupations and how they influence innovation and productivity. Using the ESCO framework, it helps measure and compare digital skill needs across sectors. Access the full study on the portal.
Job titles form a cornerstone of today's human resources (HR) processes. Within online recruitment, they allow candidates to understand the contents of a vacancy at a glance, while internal HR departments use them to organize and structure many of their processes. As job titles are a compact, convenient, and readily available data source, modeling them with high accuracy can greatly benefit many HR tech applications. In this paper, the authors propose a neural representation model for job titles, by augmenting a pre-trained language model with co-occurrence information from skill labels extracted from vacancies. JobBERT method leads to considerable improvements compared to using generic sentence encoders, for the task of job title normalisation, for a new evaluation benchmark was released. You can access the full paper via the portal.
In Natural Language Processing, entity linking (EL) has centered around Wikipedia, but remains underexplored for the job market domain. Disambiguating skill mentions can help the researchers to get insight into the labor market demands. In this work, they are the first to explore EL in this domain, specifically targeting the linkage of occupational skills to the ESCO taxonomy (le Vrang et al., 2014). Previous efforts linked coarse-grained (full) sentences to a corresponding ESCO skill. In this work, they link more fine-grained span-level mentions of skills. The researchers tune two high-performing neural EL models, a bi-encoder (Wu et al., 2020) and an autoregressive model (Cao et al., 2021), on a synthetically generated mention– skill pair dataset and evaluate them on a human annotated skill-linking benchmark. You can read more about the findings via the portal.
The paper highlights the need for digital skill development in non-ICT professions, addressing challenges like lack of frameworks and AI acceptance. It suggests strategies for future-proof skill development to thrive in the digital economy. Drawing from a range of reputable sources, including the OECD and CEDEFOP, the paper underscores the need for digital competencies across sectors and outlines strategies for future-proof skill development. One primary challenge in addressing digital skill needs is identifying specific requirements across various occupations, organizational levels, and stages of job maturity. The rapid pace of digital technology acceleration further complicates this effort, making it difficult to create feasible HR tools that effectively combine frameworks such as ESCO and others for the new digital age. If you want to find out more about the paper you can download it via the portal.
This paper reviews trends in income inequality in the EU over the last fifteen years and presents a comprehensive framework to assess and monitor income inequalities and related key policy areas. It relies on a three-stages approach, namely considering pre-market, in-market and post-market stages in income inequality in order to present an integrated policy approach. Find out more on the portal.
For the latest ESCO update, v1.2, the European Commission's ESCO team and the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) collaborated to align the European Cybersecurity Skills Framework (ECSF) with the ESCO classification. For more details on how these frameworks were mapped, including the relationships between specific roles and occupations, further information is available in the documents on the portal.
In this paper, the authors propose a novel method that relies on pretrained language models (PLMs), prompt tuning with rules (PTR) , and the structured multilingual ESCO taxonomy, to efficiently and cheaply generate large amounts of labeled data for learning a variety of downstream tasks for extracting structured information from unstructured labour market data. Read more about it on the portal.
This report sheds light on how EU cohesion funds are being invested in skills to boost competitiveness and prosperity in Europe.
