According to Article 19 of the Regulation (EU) 2016/589 and for the purpose of automated matching through the EURES platform, European Commission called its Member States to map their national, regional and sectoral occupational classifications (NOCs) and skills classifications (NSCs) to and from the European classification of Skills/Competences, Qualifications and Occupations (ESCO). Alternatively, Member States could choose to replace their national, regional and sectoral classifications with ESCO.

In another words, this EURES Regulation aims at providing better job search and recruitment services across Europe and at boosting intra-EU labour mobility. Once national systems adopt ESCO or are mapped to it, information that is transmitted to EURES will be based on ESCO. Thanks to ESCO, these CVs and job vacancies will contain more standardised and detailed information covering knowledge, skills and competences, and qualifications.

The first pilot project for this mapping was conducted back in 2018 together with the public employment services of Austria and Sweden. Four years after, 21 countries have mapped their national taxonomy to ESCO and 4 have directly adopted ESCO in their system (Greece, Iceland, Finland, Ireland).

The importance of mapping national classifications to ESCO

"Mapping" or "thesaurus alignment" refers to the process of creating a correspondence table between two classifications. As part of the process, which can be assisted by software tools, an expert identifies corresponding concepts in the two classifications and records a relationship (mapping) between them.

In order to further promote labour mobility, facilitate the exchange of job vacancies and job seeker profiles and ensure a high quality matching across languages and national contexts, Article 19 of the Regulation (EU) 2016/589 provides the legal obligation of Member States to adopt ESCO or to map their national classifications to ESCO.

How is the mapping conducted?

To facilitate the process of mapping national classifications to ESCO, the European Commission provided Member States with technical assistance.

• Other than carrying out two pilot projects that served as learning resources, the Commission also published the ESCO Implementation Manual that explains the appropriate methodology for establishing accurate mapping relations between national occupation or skills concepts and ESCO concepts.
• To facilitate the mapping exercise, the Commission has released the ESCO mapping platform, an IT application designed to help establish and update inventories and mapping tables between national classifications and ESCO.
• ESCO mapping platform user manual was also created as a document to guide the users in the navigation through the mapping platform and describe how to use its functionalities to create and manage mapping relations.
• Finally, in order to support Member States, the EURES and ESCO teams have organised various peer learning activities, trainings and workshops over the past years.

See all country mapping tables: EURES Countries Mapping Tables | Esco (europa.eu).

If you are interested in learning more about the status of the Mapping process in your EU Country, or in case you may have any further enquiry, please contact EMPL-ESCO-SECRETARIAT@ec.europa.eu.