European Classification of Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations

Are you an ESCO implementer? Do you use ESCO for job-matching, career guidance, labour market intelligence or other use case? We want to hear from you! Our evaluation survey is open until 31st of December 2021. More information is available below.

The Commission is preparing to launch a new major ESCO version at the end of 2021. The new ESCO version 1.1 will include new occupations and skills and a revised transversal skills hierarchy, reflecting emerging labour market changes due to the digital and green transition. To celebrate the launch of ESCO v1.1., the Commission is organising an online live webinar at the beginning of February 2022. More information is available below.

The Commission invites EU Member States and other interested parties to engage in the third phase of the pilot linking ESCO skills with qualifications learning outcomes. Stakeholders can express their interest in participating in the pilot project until 5th December 2021. For more information on the conditions and methodology, see below.

Did you run a project in which ESCO occupations or skills were used for e.g. describing job vacancies or for drafting drafting VET curricula? Did you identify usability problems for end users of ESCO? The EU co-funded project, FLIP, investigates expectations and preferred search strategies of ESCO users in the cultural and creative sectors and industries (CCSI) and would like to learn from similar experiences.

The ESCO Annual Report 2020 covers the latest ESCO developments that took place during 2020. Highlights include the work done by the Commission to ensure the continuous improvement of the classification towards a new major version (v1.1) as well as to support ESCO's uptake in the labour market and education and training by a wide community of stakeholders.

ESCO participated in Bruegel’s podcast episode "The skills of the future. What challenges and opportunities does technology bring to the labour market?" In this episode, the speakers discussed about the role of technological innovation in shaping the labour market. The podcast is available at the link below.

The Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) recently published a study on digital learning in the region. The work is based on two virtual surveys: the first focuses on the need for learning digital and soft skills, while the second investigates the individual interest in learning about a specific topic. The surveys use the ESCO classification as the nomenclature for digital skills. The study is available in Spanish at the link below.

The 22nd of July 2022, the Spanish Public Employment Services (PES) representative presented the role of ESCO as a tool in building a regional qualifications framework during a videoconference organised by ILO/Cinterfor in Latin America. More than 200 participants had the opportunity to learn about how the recognition of qualifications can support the integration of national systems of education and the comparison of qualifications. The conference follows the successful conclusion of the bi-directional mapping of occupations - from the national classification (CO-SISPE) to ESCO, and vice versa.

On 28 May 2021, the ESCO team participated in a working group of the Skillshub Euregio pilot, a project aimed to design solutions for a skills-based education and labour market approach in the Euregio Rijn-Waal. The collaboration highlighted two showcases by ESCO implementers working on this topic in the region: SkillLab and Milch und Zucker. They shared their experience with using ESCO in their respective labour market applications, which served as an inspiration and learning opportunity for the members of the hub.

The ESCO team presented the classification to Egyptian stakeholders within the project "Towards a Holistic Approach to Labour Migration Governance and Labour Mobility in North Africa (THAMM)" in a webinar on the 15th of November 2021. Representatives from the International Organisation of Migration and Egyptian stakeholders were particularly interested in learning more about ESCO and other existing mechanisms for the assessment, certification, validation and recognition of migrants' skills and qualifications. More information is available below.