Frequently Asked Questions

The panorama of ESCO implementers is wide and diverse. It includes European institutions, large companies, SMEs, start-ups, research bodies, universities, vocational training institutes, public and private employment services.  

ESCO’s concepts and the relations between them can be understood by electronic systems. This allows different systems and platforms to use ESCO to suggest the most relevant jobs to jobseekers on the basis of their skills or the most relevant trainings to people who want to reskill or upskill. 

The three main use cases for ESCO implementation are:  

• Job matching and job searching ; 

• Career learning and development management; 

• Statistics and big data analysis of the labour market. 

More information in this regard can be found at https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/howtouse/bfe2a816-f9dd-49df-a7d2-ec8fafcfce95  

Examples of use cases can be found at https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/document/en/47b25dc1-145c-4f88-aa7c-fea929e47cf5  

ESCO stakeholders directly contribute to advancing ESCO’s visibility and fitness for purpose in the labour market and the education and training sector. 

ESCO stakeholders and implementers are encouraged to contact the Commission using the ESCO forum and/or the email address: EMPL-ESCO-SECRETARIAT@ec.europa.eu . The Commission is actively seeking to: 

• understand how implementers are using ESCO in their applications and services; 

• collect feedback in order to continuously improve ESCO; 

• exchange knowledge on AI techniques and data science applications for maintaining and improving ESCO; 

• create an ESCO community of practice centred around peer learning and knowledge sharing for the mutual benefit of all ESCO implementers. 

ESCO can be used by developers as a building block for different types of applications that provide services such as auto complete, suggestion systems, job search algorithms and job matching algorithms. 

The ESCO classification is published in SKOS-RDF and CSV formats, in order to enable users to integrate it into their applications and services. The files can be downloaded here. 

The ESCO classification is composed of modules that contain elements such as occupations, knowledge, skills and competences, qualifications, and the International Standard Classification of Occupations (ISCO) hierarchy. When combined and interrelated, these modules make up the whole classification. 

There are three main types of module: 

• Core modules hold the actual ESCO concepts (occupations, skills, etc.) along with their Unique Resource Identifiers (URIs). 

• Linking modules provide links between two or more modules, at least one of which is a core module. An example is the relation between occupations and skills. 

• Supporting modules enrich the core modules with supporting classification schemes such as ISCO-08. 

The Commission is offering access to ESCO through an Application Programming Interface (API), a tool for developers to access data and services in order to build all sorts of applications quickly and competently. 

ESCO is published as Linked Open Data (LOD) so it can be easily reused and linked to other data sources. Using the Linked Open Data method helps users to: 

• easily integrate data into their existing IT systems; 

• link to other data; 

• ensure that the data is well managed and quality-assured before publication; 

• ensure that continuously updating the data doesn’t lead to high administrative costs. 

Article 19 of the EURES Regulation and its Implementing Decisions adopted by the European Commission on 18 July 2018 provide for the use of ESCO with a view to developing an automated skills-based matching tool through the EURES portal. To enable successful implementation, Member States need to supply the job vacancies and CVs using ESCO codes defining occupations and skills. Member States have until August 2021 to map their national occupational classifications/national skills classifications to ESCO. Alternatively, they can decide to directly adopt ESCO. 

By the end of 2020, the state of play was the following:  

• 17 Member States were in the process of mapping occupations; 

• 5 Member States were in the process of mapping skills; 

• 4 Member States were in the process of adopting occupations; 

• 4 Member States were in the process of adopting skills. 

Currently the mapping tables are not available online but the Commission will publish them on the ESCO portal within the next months

ESCO is continuously updated to reflect changes in the European labour market and in education and training. These changes are reflected in new versions of the ESCO classification. These are differentiated between minor and major: 

• Minor versions: contain changes that do not affect the concept level (i.e. no concepts are added, no concepts are 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 and the scope of the existing concepts is changed) and/or the data model. 

The first fully-fledged ESCO (major) version was ESCO v1.0. Already before this version (in order to manage the minor versions that would lead to the first major one), a versioning mechanism was put in place to keep track of changes in ESCO and manage its versions. In 2020, the Commission released four ESCO minor versions, i.e. v1.0.5 – v1.0.8 and commenced preparing the next ESCO major version, i.e. V1.2. More information about the different ESCO versions can be found here: https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/version.  

The web-based service API is designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over the World Wide Web. It provides applications with access to the different versions of the ESCO classification. The functionalities of the ESCO Web Services API covers the majority of ESCO business cases. The ESCO Web Services API receives requests for information on concepts or terms and provides a response in a format specific to the sender of the request. 

The ESCO Local API is the downloadable version of the ESCO API, which can be installed locally on a computer or server and thus provides local access to the ESCO API. Compared with the use of the ESCO API hosted by the Commission, the advantage of installing the ESCO API locally is an increased performance and the independence from the availability of the service provided by the Commission.  

ESCO concepts are developed through the combination of several sources. National classifications, reports, job vacancies and research papers are constantly reviewed and analysed to identify skills and occupations belonging to the European labour market.  

In the first development phase of ESCO, the Commission, with the collaboration of sectoral and occupational experts, analysed studies, national, regional and sectoral classifications, and relevant international classifications and standards. The rationale behind the use of existing sources was to build on the information of existing national and sectoral classifications, to ensure a good geographical coverage, reflect labour market reality and facilitate the mapping to national classifications. 

For ESCO version 1.1, the Commission carried out desk research to identify the main trend for each sector of the labour market, with a special focus for green and IT topics, reviewed stakeholders’ feedback on this work and created new concepts. The latter were then validated by European sectoral associations, implementers, the ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI), and the Member States Working Group (MSWG).  

For the future updates, the Commission plans to include the use of data science and artificial intelligence, using data sources like CVs, job vacancies and qualifications from various training providers.  

During 2019 and 2020, the Commission analysed the feedback provided by ESCO stakeholders and implementers through different channels: the ESCO community fora, surveys, individual contacts with sectoral stakeholders. Based on the volume of inputs received and on the results of the analysis of this contribution, the update of the ESCO classification was structured in two major blocks:   

• the content update exercise  

• the targeted quality review of occupations and skills 

The content update is structured in three work packages: the preparation phase, the research and analysis phase and the implementation phase (creation of new content and changes to existing occupations). The visual below summarises the main steps undertaken. A detailed explanation of each step is provided in section 5.1 of the annual report for 2020.  

Addressing quality issues was retained as one of the key challenges for improving the usability of the classification. The Commission decided therefore to conduct a complete review of the occupations and skills pillars, which, combined to the feedback received from ESCO implementers, allowed to:  

• identify duplicate and/or ambiguous concepts;   

• correct typographic errors;  

• reduce preferred terms that are too long;  

• modify incorrect sentences;  

• revise the action verbs used in terms (preferred or non-preferred);  

• identify issues in the implementation of skills contextualisation;  

• identify skills which are described as tasks or detailed activities;   

• identify imbalances in the distribution of skills across occupations;  

• adjust mappings of occupations to ISCO;  

• address inconsistencies in the hierarchical structure of occupations (broader/narrower relations);  

• modify the list of non-preferred terms;  

• correct misallocations of skills in the skills hierarchy.  

Terminological, conceptual and format guidelines have been evaluated to ensure they provide the necessary guidance to address the quality issues. Every modification to the classification has been quality assured by the Member States through targeted consultations. 

For future versions of ESCO, the Commission is currently exploring how new technologies could support finding these quality issues or deviations from the guidelines and prevent them from occurring. This will make quality assurance of ESCO more efficient. 

The development of the ESCO classification started in 2013. Together with stakeholders representing different sectors of economic activity, the Commission developed the occupations and the skills pillars of ESCO, focusing on labour market. To this end, they analysed a wide variety of existing sources, such as studies, job vacancies, national, regional and sectoral classifications, and relevant international classifications and standards. 

The most important sources used were national occupation classifications from Member States (such as Berufenet, ROME, the Czech National System of Occupations and the UK NOS), classifications with a European scope (such as NACE and EurOccupations) and classifications with an international scope (such as ISCO). They were selected following different criteria including typology (classification, qualification standards, etc.), scope (European, national, etc.), quality and richness of the information. 

To ensure that the ESCO terminology is fit for use in the education and training sector, the Commission and the stakeholders involved complemented these sources with information extracted from learning outcomes descriptions of qualifications. 

The approach for developing occupational profiles varied depending on the sector. For some sectors of economic activity, expert groups (the Sectoral Reference Groups) developed the entire classification or, in some cases, worked on the basis of a draft provided by the Commission. For other sectors, the Commission developed a draft classification and submitted it for an online consultation with different stakeholders. 

ESCO ensures that citizens can easily gather information about how occupations are regulated in each Member State when they search for a job. By providing a direct reference to the Regulated Professions Database, ESCO increases transparency regarding the legal requirements of these occupations.  

Additionally, for occupations that are regulated at European level, ESCO provides a direct link to the Directive 2005/36/EC on the recognition of professional qualifications, as amended by the Directive 2013/55/EC.