European Classification of Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations

The latest major version of ESCO, released on May 13, introduced 35 occupations, 42 new skills and 196 new knowledge concepts. Moreover, 677 alternative labels are added to new or previous ESCO concepts, together with 96 hidden terms. Additionally, 18 quality improvements tasks were performed. Over 12000 concepts have been updated. Improvements range from removing duplicate terms, correction of orphan skills, reallocation of skills and knowledges in the skills hierarchy. Improvements on existing translations in 8 languages and inclusion of national sign languages. Stakeholders are encouraged to update their systems to reflect the latest EU Labour Market developments. Additionally, to better understand the changes introduced in this version, the delta file is available for download, providing a clear comparison with the previous release.

To mark the launch of the new major version of ESCO, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion, in collaboration with the European Training Foundation, organised a promotion event: "ESCO 1.2: A Global Language for Skills" on the 21st and 22nd of May 2024. The event was showcased several testimonials of how ESCO is used within and outside the EU, with particular emphasis on the use of ESCO for enhancing job matching, developing classification systems, analysing labour market data, providing guidance services, and updating the learning offer. The second day of the event focused on how the EU candidate, accession and ETF partner countries can use ESCO in their contexts with practical implications for translating, adopting or mapping their classifications to ESCO. Check out the presentations on the portal!

ESCO is pleased to announce upcoming improvements to the portal’s data download functionality. Soon, users will be able to download data in additional formats, including JSON and XML, offering greater flexibility for integrating ESCO data into various systems and workflows. These new formats will make it easier for developers and data analysts to work with ESCO data in their preferred formats, improving efficiency and usability. Follow the ESCO News section to be informed about this new function.

ESCOpedia, a reference guide for understanding key ESCO concepts and structure, has been updated! It provides clear, concise explanations on various topics, making it easier for users to navigate and apply ESCO in their work. ESCOpedia is updated so explore grouped topics, use the alphabetical index, or search directly for terms that interest you. Learn more on ESCO and share your feedback with the ESCO team to help us improve!

In September 2024, the European Commission opened and chaired the ESCO Member States Working Group focus meeting where the Member States were informed about the upcoming language consultation and dived into the topic of developing new heuristic principles for ESCO.

At the Qualifications Authority’s international conference, lifelong learning and the assessment of skills were at the center of the discussions. ESCO Secretariat was invited to the conference on 19th of September "Making use of your skills" and participated in the discussion panel: “How do skills systems support lifelong learning?” which led to fruitful exchanges on skills and building classifications based on ESCO.

Learn more about how Ankaadia is leveraging ESCO in their services.

Discover about the deep learning-based computational job market analysis through the survey on skill extraction and classification from job postings.

Explore the different methodologies to identify green jobs in cross-country comparable data that are regularly and timely available for EU Member States and assess their usefulness for policy-relevant labour market analysis.

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.

Read this study that maps the DigComp framework (European Digital Competence Framework for citizens) to the skills descriptors of ESCO (European Skills, Competencies, Qualifications and Occupations), the classification of skills which is used in the Skills-OVATE, the database of European online job advertisement (OJA).

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.