ESCO provides a standard terminology that can help you to understand the information contained in job vacancies, CVs and qualifications. This allows labour market information to be exchanged easily and strong partnerships to develop between public and private employment services, as well as with education and training providers.

ESCO can help you to define the skills, competences and qualifications required for the jobs you are offering. As ESCO is multilingual, you can find these skills, competences and qualifications in 26 European languages. You can also help your clients to create professional profiles that list the knowledge, skills and competences they have acquired through formal, non-formal or informal learning, or work experience.

ESCO enables IT systems to transform a jobseeker’s work experience and qualifications into a likely set of skills and competences. Based on this, you can more accurately and transparently match jobseekers to job vacancies or employers to potential recruits. As ESCO is multilingual, it can support competence-based job matching across language barriers.

Used alongside technologies such as natural language processing (NLP) and artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML), ESCO contributes to classifying more easily job vacancies in a job board and improving the job search experience of candidates by providing better matched results.

Over time, ESCO will be improved with the most in-demand skills and occupations as new developments in the labour market and the education and training sector emerge. This will allow you to access and use the most up-to-date information available without extra effort.

ESCO will support the automated skills-based matching of the EURES portal. EURES is the network of European employment services which aims to provide information, advice and recruitment and placement services for workers and employers in the European Union.

In 2016, the EURES Regulation aiming to put in place better job search and recruitment services across Europe was adopted. It reinforces the cooperation between Member States and the Commission regarding interoperability, in particular the exchange of CVs and job vacancies via a single coordinated channel and automated matching between job vacancies and CVs. Article 19 of the EURES Regulation provided for the use of ESCO for the automated skills-based matching tool of the EURES portal. To enable successful implementation, Member States need to supply job vacancies using ESCO codes for occupations and skills. Member States have until August 2021 to map their national occupational classifications/national skills classifications to ESCO or to directly adopt ESCO in their national systems.

Thanks to ESCO, the CVs and vacancies exchanged in EURES will contain more standardised and detailed information covering knowledge, skills and competences and qualifications.  

ESCO is used in Europass to enhance its matching functionalities for jobseekers. The ESCO occupations and skills are used in Europass in the following sections:

• in the Europass profile: users can either select an ESCO occupation or use free text to fill the field “occupation or position held” for a specific work experience. Also, they can either select a language from a list including i.a. ESCO language skills, or use free text to fill the fields “mother tongue” and “other languages”. 

• in My skills section: 

  • Skills suggestions: End-users receive skills suggestions to build their skills profile. These suggestions are drawn from ESCO and are generated based on analysis of their e-Portfolio content and user-similarity.  

  • Manually add ESCO skills: End-users use the search field fed by ESCO skills to manually add ESCO skills to their skills profile.   

  • My Skills display: End-users see their skills displayed in their skills profile according to the hierarchy of skill groups.  

  • ESCO skills descriptions: End-users can consult the ESCO skills descriptions when clicking on a skill suggestion, or on a skill in the search dropdown when manually adding a skill, and in their skills profile.  

• My Interests section:

  • End-users specify what interests them in the form of interest tags. Next to free text, end-users benefit from controlled lists like ESCO occupations and skills to create interest tags. The interest tags will serve as one of the inputs to offer end-users tailored course and job suggestions.