The Commission has launched the first full version of the European classification of Skills, Competences, Occupations and Qualifications (ESCO). The classification is available in 26 languages (the 24 EU languages, Icelandic and Norwegian).

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ESCO facilitates the dialogue between labour market and the education/training sector by providing a common language that could help overcome labour market imbalances and increase occupational and geographical mobility in the EU.

Concretely, ESCO

• connects people and jobs, by providing a common language that helps jobseekers to find the job that best matches their skills. As recruitment is increasingly digitised, both employers and jobseekers need to use digital tools that allow them to communicate in a meaningful manner. ESCO aims to make these digital tools work better together;
• connects employment and education, as education providers can use it to describe the expected learning outcomes of their curricula and to understand the labour market trends and future skills needs better;
• connects labour markets at EU level, by acting as the digital enabler of labour market mobility. The Commission has the ambition for ESCO to become the European classification for the information exchange via EURES, the European job mobility portal.

The first full version (ESCO v1) is available free of charge through the ESCO service platform.

It covers

• 2 942 occupations,
• 13 485 knowledge, skills and competences

and will progressively display information on qualifications provided by the Member States.

The Commission also envisages integrating private, international and sectorial qualifications from other sources into ESCO in the near future. It is piloting this approach and discussing it with the Member States.

The publication of ESCO v1 is a key milestone in the achievement of objectives of the Europe 2020 strategy and the New Skills Agenda for Europe. The publication will be followed by a conference entitled “ESCO: connecting people and jobs” that will take place in Brussels the 9 and 10 of October 2017. With this occasion, the Commission will showcase concrete use cases of ESCO and its added value in applications.

ESCO is managed by the European Commission has been developed in close cooperation with CEDEFOP and a wide variety of stakeholders from the labour market and education and training sector.