European Classification of Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations

The ESCO portal gets a new look & feel, with improved functionalities to download the classification and increased visibility for ESCO implementers! See what has changed and let us know your feedback! As with all things new, there are still a few disruptions to the functionalities available, but please rest assured we are fixing them. We apologize in advance and we thank you for your patience!

Are you an ESCO implementer and want to showcase your services or projects based on ESCO? Please fill in the attached ESCO implementers' fiche with information about your organisation, how you use ESCO and how it contributes to the goals of your organisation! We will publish it in the ESCO portal to inspire ESCO newcomers and to facilitate networking among the ESCO community of stakeholders. P.S: make sure to acknowledge ESCO in your application, study or project!

The Commission has published a new major version of ESCO which includes: new occupations and skills, a new transversal skills hierarchy, labels for green, digital, and research skills and quality improvements. Visit the ESCO portal to consult or download the new version and let us know what you think!

The EU is taking further steps to help Member States ensure Ukrainian refugees can effectively access their right to education, healthcare, accommodation and jobs, according to the Temporary Protection Directive. Among them, the ESCO taxonomy will be translated into Ukrainian to allow relevant stakeholders (HR software providers, Public employment services, career counsellors, etc) to support the integration of refugees into the labour market and their access to education. Read more about the different actions below.

Connecting a job title with an ESCO occupation is often not a trivial task. In this article, the ESCO team discusses the role of contextual information, such as tasks, knowledge, and skills to connect data to ESCO occupations. First, we complement a job title with a single piece of additional information. We then examine the outcomes of entirely discarding the job title from the input, only leaving the context with a limited set of skills and tasks. Finally, we experiment with more raw input extracted from a job vacancy. Read our blog below to find out more.

The Commission presented the newly published ESCO version (v1.1) in a live webinar with 350 stakeholders from across Europe. ESCO stakeholders got an insight into ESCO v1.1, learned about our artificial intelligence approach and asked questions about the usage of ESCO.

Register now to join the conversation about how PES and their partners can work together to meet the rapidly evolving needs of Europe’s labour market. High-level speakers include the European Commissioner Nicolas Schmit, the PES Network Chair Johannes Kopf and representatives of organisations such as, Eurofound, ETUC, Business Europe, ILO, World Employment Confederation (WEC), SME United, European Labour Authority (ELA), and OECD.

The Greek public employment service has recently adopted ESCO in their job-matching system. Find out more about their decision, how this impacts the services provided to job-seekers and the advantages of using ESCO nationally.

ESCO is used in an Erasmus+ project to create a SkillsPath Tool that matches formal and informal skills of seafarers with onshore professions in an effort to provide alternative career pathways. Find out more below.

Within CSIRO’s Data61, the digital research arm of Australia’s national science agency, researchers are using ESCO to support the rapid upskilling and reskilling that is needed for Australian businesses and workers to engage with the economic opportunities created by emerging technologies. The ESCO skills taxonomy is a central point in several projects they run, contributing to their machine learning activity that identifies skills trends from job vacancies and evaluating the currency of vocational education and training courses. Find out more about their work below.

This study looks at possible areas on which Talent Partnerships can be developed within a mutually-beneficial framework with Southern Mediterranean countries, with a focus on future skills needs (green & digital skills) and international skills-based matching. As a standard taxonomy, ESCO plays a key role in analysing skills trends from job vacancies and contributes to facilitate such talent partnerships by addressing common skills needs.