Call for expression of interest in providing feedback to the skills clustering exercise
ESCO consultation
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The ESCO Secretariat is working on a new system for clustering ESCO skills which will accompany, without replacing it, the current structure of the skills pillar. This alternative hierarchy aims to improve the user experience by making navigation within the classification more intuitive, and to serve various use cases such as skill recommendation, statistical reporting, or job and course recommendation. These clusters in fact are more closely linked to sectors of economic activities compared to the current ESCO skill hierarchy.
The methodology used for the creation of the alternative skills hierarchy combined expert knowledge and data science techniques, grouping skills into clusters and showing how they relate to each other.
The ESCO Secretariat is therefore calling ESCO implementers to express their interest in testing the new clustering and review the allocation of ESCO skills to the newly created clusters.
Target stakeholders
This call for interest is aiming to bring together various stakeholders and use cases. The testing should provide insights into the performance and suitability of the new structure among others for job matching and career guidance, implementation of skills taxonomies in profile builders, labour market intelligence and clustering of real-life terminology to ESCO, annotation of learning outcomes. We welcome the participation from different types of organisations: public and private employment services, statistical offices, job boards and job matching platforms, organisations implementing ESCO in talent management and HR systems, research bodies, and educational institutions.
Each interested organisation should provide a description of the intended use cases and how they plan to perform the testing. This includes detailing the objectives of the test, expectations regarding the new clusters, and explaining the testing approach, including defined metrics and measured tasks.
If you are interested, please fill in the survey by 20th January 2025.