The Commission has published a new minor updated version of the European classification of Skills, Competences, Occupations and Qualifications (ESCO).

ESCO v1.1.1 is the result of a data-driven quality review of the database and of the feedback provided by Member States, and is focused on two main goals: the maintenance of the ESCO skills hierarchy and the quality review of translations of occupations and skills concepts.

Rather than adding or removing content from the database, minor updates of ESCO primarily introduce improvements to the taxonomy structure and relationships between different concepts.

What has changed?

Key changes include:

• Updated translations. Translations of the ESCO database into all EU languages, as well as Icelandic, Norwegian, and newly Ukrainian, have been reviewed following feedback from the ESCO Member States Working Group in order to improve the multilingual usability of ESCO across the Union and beyond.
• Restructured skills hierarchy. Based on feedback from taxonomy experts, ESCO v1.1.1 now includes a revised skills/competence hierarchy structure. This also includes revised mapping of skills concepts to skills groups.
• Digital skills labelling. ESCO v1.1.1 now offers a sub-set of over 1,200 skill and knowledge concepts that denote digital competences. This new unique dataset extends beyond the sub-set of DigComp (European Digital Competence Framework for Citizens) skills and is the result of labelling exercise driven by both machine learning and humans.
• Revised mapping to ISCO-08. The new minor version of ESCO now includes improved mapping of ESCO occupations to ISCO-08.
• New relationships between skills and occupations. Over 200 new linkages between skills and knowledge terms and occupation concepts have been introduced in ESCO as a result of targeted review of skills with no relations to occupations.

To support citizens and implementers in navigating the new version of ESCO, the Commission provides a changelog file listing all changes between versions.

How to access ESCO v1.1.1 and where to find more support material?

The occupations, skills and competences in the updated classification are available in the ESCO portal, in the Download Section, and via API.

The report Digital Skills and Knowledge Concepts: Labelling the ESCO classification and the document which stores the delta between ESCO v1.1 and the previous minor version (ESCOv1.1), named Delta_ESCO_v1.1.1 will be soon published in the Publications Section.