European Classification of Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations

The Commission has published a crosswalk between ESCO and O*NET, the Occupational Information Network, developed by the U.S. Department of Labor/Employment and Training Administration (US DOL). The purpose of this crosswalk is to support interoperability between the two labor market standards used by numerous public and private stakeholders that provide services like job matching, upskilling and reskilling and statistical analysis of the labour market. Modern technologies like machine learning and natural language processing greatly reduce the amount of effort needed to map one classification to another and the ESCO team reveals its methodology to do this analysis and shares the results free of charge, as always!

According to Article 19 of the Regulation (EU) 2016/589 and for the purpose of automated matching through the EURES platform, European Commission called its Member States to map their national, regional and sectoral occupational classifications (NOCs) and skills classifications (NSCs) to and from the European classification of Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO). Currently, 21 countries have mapped their national taxonomy to ESCO and 4 have directly adopted ESCO in their system (Greece, Iceland, Finland, Ireland).

ESCO v1.1.1 is the result of a data-driven quality review of the database and of the feedback provided by Member States, and is focused on two main goals: the maintenance of the ESCO skills hierarchy and the quality review of translations of occupations and skills concepts.

The ESCO API will change from the current version (v1.0.9) to the most updated major version (v1.1.0) starting from 1st of January 2023. The ESCO team advises all stakeholders that use the API to make the necessary changes in their IT systems by that time. ESCO v1.09 and v1.1.1 (the latest minor version) are also available in the API by configuring correctly the parameters for the call: i.e. selectedVersion.

The Commission is calling for applications in order to appoint a number of observers who will participate in the works of the ESCO Member States Working Group. This call is addressed to organisations, candidate countries, EEA countries, or public entities other than Member States’ authorities. Each observer shall nominate one expert as a representative to the group.

The consultation aims to align the legal framework on EU statistics with the European data strategy and modernise how statistics are produced. More specifically, it will tap the potential of new data sources, make the statistical system more responsive, specify new roles in emerging data ecosystems, and update the tasks of statistical authorities. The consultation is open until 25th of October 2022.

The Spanish networks of Euroguidance, Europass, EURES and Eurodesk organise the Learning by leaving 2022 “Digital nomads in the XXI century” conference in Spain, Palma (Majorca) on 26, 27 and 28 October 2022. The event is aimed at sharing the programs, strategies and resources that the different networks are developing for the acquisition of digital competence in citizens and its impact on labour mobility. ESCO and Europass will be presented in the plenary as well as in various workshops.

A new testimonial from an ESCO implementer: the Icelandic Public employment service adopts ESCO at national level in their effort to modernise the digital services offered to their customers.

The data science team explains in a new blog post the challenges to mapping multilingual occupational classifications to ESCO, drawing on representation learning techniques to support the maintenance of the classification. Based on synergies with EURES and Europass, the ESCO team uses an unified approach for mapping multilingual occupational classifications.