Frequently Asked Questions

Number codes may be problematic to update, especially when one skill is reallocated in another skill group within the hierarchy. On the other hand, URIs are never edited, which makes such information more reliable over ESCO versions.

For any specific request, the ESCO team is available to provide tailored tables.

The Commission is publishing ESCO as Linked Open Data so that it can be connected to a range of external knowledge sources such as classification systems, controlled vocabularies and frameworks, databases, syntactical standards or tools that make use of ESCO to provide services. 

Some of the classification systems and frameworks related to ESCO are: 

• ISCO-08: Since each ESCO occupation is mapped to one ISCO-08 unit group, the two classifications are interoperable.
• National classifications: Some EU Member States have developed and currently use occupational classifications to deliver labour market services at national level. The Commission used several of these classifications as reference during the development of ESCO. Moreover, the EURES Regulation (EU) 2016/589 lays down, inter alia, principles and rules on cooperation between the Member States and the Commission regarding interoperability and automated matching between job vacancies and job applications and CVs in the EURES portal.
• Digital Competence Framework (DigComp): DigComp 2.0 provides a vocabulary of digital competences at European level. It is developed by the Commission’s Joint Research Center (JRC). DigComp 2.0 structures 21 competences in 6 competence areas. The Commission integrated the competences of DigComp into the ESCO list of digital transversal skills.
• European Qualifications Framework (EQF): Since 2019, the Commission has been conducting a pilot project for linking qualifications with ESCO skills with candidate Member States and international organisations in different phases. For the purpose of this pilot, the Commission developed a tool based on AI and machine learning, which is fully integrated with the ESCO skills and occupation pillars and makes also use of the ESCO API.
• International Standard Classification of Education, Fields of Education (ISCED-F): The 2903 ESCO knowledge concepts are allocated to the eighty detailed fields of education defined in the International Standard Classification of Education, Fields of Education (ISCED-F). This classification was adopted as the organising framework for the knowledge concepts within the ESCO Skills and Knowledge hierarchy.
• The Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE): The ESCO team created an internal mapping of occupations to NACE which will be published once it's reviewed and validated. Interoperability between ESCO and other international or EU standards is very valuable.

The active involvement of stakeholders and experts is crucial for the continuous improvement of ESCO. Key stakeholders include employers' organisations, trade unions, employment services, education institutions, training organisations, job portals, sectoral skills councils, statistical organisations and various government bodies, job boards, HR software developers, etc. There are many ways to provide feedback: 

1. Use the contact form on the ESCO website
2. Write an email to EMPL-ESCO-SECRETARIAT@ec.europa.eu  

Moreover, stakeholders can contribute to the further improvement of ESCO by providing: 

• data already mapped to ESCO occupations and skills (such as job vacancies, CVs, qualifications, other taxonomies, etc.).
• data unmapped with ESCO but which reflect trends in the labour market (new occupations and skills)
• knowledge exchange on AI methodologies
• input on existing ESCO translations, in any of the provided languages

ESCO was developed as a sector-independent classification, where occupations are mapped in groups depending on the activities that are needed to perform an occupation. Nevertheless, in the first phase of development of the classification, the Commission used NACE revision 2, the Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community, to divide the work for building ESCO occupations. The mappings between NACE and ESCO are not public.  

More information about this topic can be found at the following link: 

https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/escopedia/List_of_sectors_of_economic_activities_for_the_development_of_ESCO_v1 

In ESCO, each occupation is mapped to exactly one ISCO-08 code. ISCO-08 can therefore be used as a hierarchical structure for the ESCO occupations pillar. ISCO-08 provides the top four levels for the occupations pillar. ESCO occupations are located at level 5 and lower.  

Since ISCO is a statistical classification, its occupation groups do not overlap. Each ESCO occupation is therefore mapped to only one ISCO unit group. It follows from this structure, that ESCO occupation concepts can be equal to or narrower than ISCO unit groups, but not broader. The result is a strictly mono-hierarchical structure where each element at level 2 or lower has exactly one parent.  

The ESCO occupations hierarchy has 4 levels: 

ISCO level 1: major group. For example, Technicians and associate professionals (3) 

ISCO level 2: sub-major group. For example, Information and communications technicians (35) 

ISCO level 3: minor group. For example, Telecommunications and broadcasting technicians (352) 

ISCO level 4: unit group. For example, Broadcasting and audiovisual technicians (3521) 

Then below ESCO occupations can be found. For example, Audio-visual technician (3521.1) 

Among the different ESCO occupations, there is sometimes a relation of broader or narrower term. For instance, Audio-visual technician (3521.1) is broader than Sound operator (3521.1.11). 

Alternative labels can be synonyms (words with similar or same meaning) but can also be spelling variants, declensions, abbreviations, etc. They are regularly used by the target group (jobseekers, employers, education institutions) to refer to concepts that are described in ESCO with the preferred term. It is a way to connect ESCO concepts to the real labour market. 

Transversal knowledge, skills and competences are relevant to a broad range of occupations and economic sectors. They are often referred to as core, basic or soft skills and are the cornerstone for the personal development of a person. Within the skills pillar, transversal skills and competences are organised in a hierarchical structure with the following four headings:  

• Thinking
• Application of knowledge
• Social interaction
• Attitudes and values  

Both the concepts and the hierarchical structure of the transversal knowledge, skills and competences were developed based on the analysis of a wide range of existing national and sectoral classifications, the European Dictionary of Skills and Competences (DISCO) and other sources. 

Information on qualifications at European level is now displayed in Europass, and comes from databases of national qualifications reflecting the National Qualifications Frameworks that are owned and managed by the EU Member States. 

One of ESCO's main missions is to build stronger bridges between the world of education and training and the world of work, in order to reduce skill mismatches and support the better functioning of the labour market. The vision behind ESCO is the provision of a common reference language that could support transparency, translation, comparison, identification and analysis of the content of a qualification, thus helping to indicate how those relate to the skills and occupations needed across occupations and sectors. ESCO does so in multiple ways. 

• ESCO supports education and training systems in the shift to learning outcomes that serves better the labour market needs. Organisations that provide data on qualifications can use ESCO to annotate learning outcomes’ descriptions with skills terminology, thus integrating knowledge, skills and competence concepts. This helps learning institutions to express their learning outcomes in a way that facilitates the understanding of their qualifications by labour market actors and to attract learners from within and across borders. The Commission is conducting a pilot project in order to test automated linking of learning outcomes of qualifications with ESCO skills in different languages and has developed a dedicated IT tool to support national authorities in this exercise.
• ESCO skills and occupations can be used to provide jobseekers and learners with tailored suggestions of learning and training opportunities. Digital platforms can use ESCO to provide citizens with information on learning opportunities, suggest courses, develop tailor made training opportunities and recommend learning paths based on people’s skills. Career guidance providers can use ESCO to provide guidance services and recommend relevant training based on the skills set and career aspirations of an individual.
• ESCO can be used for the validation of informal and non-formal learning. The clear and detailed learning outcomes that are provided through ESCO can be used to identify, document, assess and certify the skills and experience that an individual has acquired through informal or non-formal learning. 

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. 

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 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.  

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.  

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

Due to their nature, transversal skills should not be linked to any occupation. With the release of v1.1 most of the links have been removed, while the links that are still existing in the classification will be removed in future updates.

As for the digital skills (aligned with DigComp framework), they are generally not assigned to occupations, but some derogations are possible. These links are expected to be reviewed in future updates of the classification.

In general, we recommend using only the links between occupations and the skills mapped in the current Skills hierarchy.