Frequently Asked Questions

Information on qualifications at European level is now displayed in Europass, and comes from databases of national qualifications reflecting the National Qualifications Frameworks that are owned and managed by the EU Member States. 

One of ESCO's main missions is to build stronger bridges between the world of education and training and the world of work, in order to reduce skill mismatches and support the better functioning of the labour market. The vision behind ESCO is the provision of a common reference language that could support transparency, translation, comparison, identification and analysis of the content of a qualification, thus helping to indicate how those relate to the skills and occupations needed across occupations and sectors. ESCO does so in multiple ways. 

• ESCO supports education and training systems in the shift to learning outcomes that serves better the labour market needs. Organisations that provide data on qualifications can use ESCO to annotate learning outcomes’ descriptions with skills terminology, thus integrating knowledge, skills and competence concepts. This helps learning institutions to express their learning outcomes in a way that facilitates the understanding of their qualifications by labour market actors and to attract learners from within and across borders. The Commission is conducting a pilot project in order to test automated linking of learning outcomes of qualifications with ESCO skills in different languages and has developed a dedicated IT tool to support national authorities in this exercise.  

• ESCO skills and occupations can be used to provide jobseekers and learners with tailored suggestions of learning and training opportunities. Digital platforms can use ESCO to provide citizens with information on learning opportunities, suggest courses, develop tailor made training opportunities and recommend learning paths based on people’s skills. Career guidance providers can use ESCO to provide guidance services and recommend relevant training based on the skills set and career aspirations of an individual. 

• ESCO can be used for the validation of informal and non-formal learning. The clear and detailed learning outcomes that are provided through ESCO can be used to identify, document, assess and certify the skills and experience that an individual has acquired through informal or non-formal learning. 

Transversal knowledge, skills and competences are relevant to a broad range of occupations and economic sectors. They are often referred to as core, basic or soft skills and are the cornerstone for the personal development of a person. Within the skills pillar, transversal skills and competences are organised in a hierarchical structure with the following four headings:  

• Thinking  

• Application of knowledge  

• Social interaction  

• Attitudes and values  

Both the concepts and the hierarchical structure of the transversal knowledge, skills and competences were developed based on the analysis of a wide range of existing national and sectoral classifications, the European Dictionary of Skills and Competences (DISCO) and other sources. 

The skills pillar includes knowledge, skills and competences that are defined as follows:  

Knowledge: The body of facts, principles, theories and practices that is related to a field of work or study. Knowledge is described as theoretical and/or factual, and is the outcome of the assimilation of information through learning.  

Skill: The ability to apply knowledge and use know-how to complete tasks and solve problems. Skills are described as cognitive (involving the use of logical, intuitive and creative thinking) or practical (involving manual dexterity and the use of methods, materials, tools and instruments).  

Competence: The proven ability to use knowledge, skills and personal, social and/or methodological abilities, in work or study situations, and in professional and personal development. 

While sometimes used as synonyms, the scope of the terms “skill” and “competence” can be distinguished. “Skill” refers to the use of methods or instruments in a particular setting and in relation to defined tasks. “Competence” is broader and refers to the ability of a person, facing new situations and unforeseen challenges, to use and apply knowledge and skills in an independent and self-directed way. However, there is no distinction between skills and competences recorded in the ESCO skills pillar. 

Alternative labels can be synonyms (words with similar or same meaning) but can also be spelling variants, declensions, abbreviations, etc. They are regularly used by the target group (jobseekers, employers, education institutions) to refer to concepts that are described in ESCO with the preferred term. It is a way to connect ESCO concepts to the real labour market. 

In ESCO, each occupation is mapped to exactly one ISCO-08 code. ISCO-08 can therefore be used as a hierarchical structure for the ESCO occupations pillar. ISCO-08 provides the top four levels for the occupations pillar. ESCO occupations are located at level 5 and lower.  

Since ISCO is a statistical classification, its occupation groups do not overlap. Each ESCO occupation is therefore mapped to only one ISCO unit group. It follows from this structure, that ESCO occupation concepts can be equal to or narrower than ISCO unit groups, but not broader. The result is a strictly mono-hierarchical structure where each element at level 2 or lower has exactly one parent.  

The ESCO occupations hierarchy has 4 levels: 

ISCO level 1: major group. For example, Technicians and associate professionals (3) 

ISCO level 2: sub-major group. For example, Information and communications technicians (35) 

ISCO level 3: minor group. For example, Telecommunications and broadcasting technicians (352) 

ISCO level 4: unit group. For example, Broadcasting and audiovisual technicians (3521) 

Then below ESCO occupations can be found. For example, Audio-visual technician (3521.1) 

Among the different ESCO occupations, there is sometimes a relation of broader or narrower term. For instance, Audio-visual technician (3521.1) is broader than Sound operator (3521.1.11). 

ESCO was developed as a sector-independent classification, where occupations are mapped in groups depending on the activities that are needed to perform an occupation. Nevertheless, in the first phase of development of the classification, the Commission used NACE revision 2, the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community, to divide the work for building ESCO occupations. The mappings between NACE and ESCO are not public.  

More information about this topic can be found at the following link: 

https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/escopedia/List_of_sectors_of_economic_activities_for_the_development_of_ESCO_v1 

The active involvement of stakeholders and experts is crucial for the continuous improvement of ESCO. Key stakeholders include employers' organisations, trade unions, employment services, education institutions, training organisations, job portals, sectoral skills councils, statistical organisations and various government bodies, job boards, HR software developers, etc. There are many ways to provide feedback: 

1. Use the contact form on the ESCO website  
2. Write an email to EMPL-ESCO-SECRETARIAT@ec.europa.eu  

Moreover, stakeholders can contribute to the further improvement of ESCO by providing: 

• data already mapped to ESCO occupations and skills (such as job vacancies, CVs, qualifications, other taxonomies, etc.). 

• data unmapped with ESCO but which reflect trends in the labour market (new occupations and skills) 

• knowledge exchange on AI methodologies 

• input on existing ESCO translations, in any of the provided languages

The Commission is publishing ESCO as Linked Open Data so that it can be connected to a range of external knowledge sources such as classification systems, controlled vocabularies and frameworks, databases, syntactical standards or tools that make use of ESCO to provide services. 

Some of the classification systems and frameworks related to ESCO are: 

• ISCO-08: Since each ESCO occupation is mapped to one ISCO-08 unit group, the two classifications are interoperable. 
• National classifications: Some EU Member States have developed and currently use occupational classifications to deliver labour market services at national level. The Commission used several of these classifications as reference during the development of ESCO. Moreover, the EURES Regulation (EU) 2016/589 lays down, inter alia, principles and rules on cooperation between the Member States and the Commission regarding interoperability and automated matching between job vacancies and job applications and CVs in the EURES portal.  
• Digital Competence Framework (DigComp): DigComp 2.0 provides a vocabulary of digital competences at European level. It is developed by the Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC). DigComp 2.0 structures 21 competences in 6 competence areas. The Commission integrated the competences of DigComp into the ESCO list of digital transversal skills. 
• European Qualifications Framework (EQF): Since 2019, the Commission has been conducting a pilot project for linking qualifications with ESCO skills with candidate Member States and international organisations in different phases. For the purpose of this pilot, the Commission developed a tool based on AI and machine learning, which is fully integrated with the ESCO skills and occupation pillars and makes also use of the ESCO API. 
• International Standard Classification of Education, Fields of Education (ISCED-F): The 2903 ESCO knowledge concepts are allocated to the eighty detailed fields of education defined in the International Standard Classification of Education, Fields of Education (ISCED-F). This classification was adopted as the organising framework for the knowledge concepts within the ESCO Skills and Knowledge hierarchy. 
• The Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE): The ESCO team created an internal mapping of occupations to NACE which will be published once it's reviewed and validated. Interoperability between ESCO and other international or EU standards is very valuable.

ESCO is continuously updated to reflect changes in the European labour market and in education and training. These changes need to be reflected in new versions of the ESCO classification and they include: 

• Changes in the labour market 

• Changes in curricula 

• Changes in terminology 

• Changes in the requirements of IT applications 

These changes are reflected in new versions of the ESCO classification, differentiated between minor and major: 

Minor versions contain changes that do not affect the concept level (i.e. no concepts are added or removed and the scope of the existing concepts is not changed). Minor releases refer to typos, adding or removing relations between concepts, making minor changes to the labels and the descriptions, etc. and do not require any update of mapping tables. 

Major versions contain changes that affect either the concept level (i.e. concepts are added, concepts are removed or the scope of existing concepts is changed) and/or the data model. 

Several minor versions have been released since the launch of ESCO and they contain small updates such as correction of typos, addition of translations, or improvements of the API services.  

At the end of 2021, the first major update will take place with the release of version 1.1. It includes semantic additions to the classification, including new terms related to contemporary labour market trends. The plan in the future is to release major updates with a higher frequency, which will be possible thanks to the use of data science and artificial intelligence.   

The Commission has developed ESCO with the following aims: 

• To improve the communication between the education and training sector and the EU labour market; 

• To support occupational mobility in Europe; 

• To make data more transparent and easily available for use by various stakeholders, such as public employment services, statistical organisations and education organisations; 

• To facilitate the exchange of data between employers, education providers and job seekers irrespective of language or country; 

• To support evidence-based policy making by enhancing the collection, comparison and dissemination of data in skills intelligence and statistical tools, and by enabling better analysis of skills supply and demand in real-time based on big data.