ESCO v1.1 launched
European Commission - 16/03/2022
What is ESCO?
ESCO (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations) is the European multilingual classification of Skills, Competences and Occupations.
ESCO works as a dictionary, describing, identifying and classifying professional occupations and skills relevant for the EU labour market and education and training. Those concepts and the relationships between them can be understood by electronic systems, which allows different online platforms to use ESCO for services like matching jobseekers to jobs on the basis of their skills, suggesting trainings to people who want to reskill or upskill etc.
ESCO provides descriptions of 2.942 occupations and 13.485 skills linked to these occupations, translated into 27 languages (all official EU languages plus Icelandic, Norwegian and Arabic).
The aim of ESCO is to support job mobility across Europe and therefore a more integrated and efficient labour market, by offering a "common language" on occupations and skills that can be used by different stakeholders on employment and education and training topics.
The European Commissioner for Jobs and Social rights, Nicolas Schmit expressed his appreciation to all ESCO stakeholders that contributed to its development.
The launch webinar’s agenda included three main presentations and time for questions and answers from the audience. More concretely, stakeholders learned about:
- What is new in this major version and the methodology for this continuous improvement process;
- How this affects existing users and more generally how to access ESCO data;
- ESCO’s plans and concrete examples of using artificial intelligence to continuously maintain the classification.·
The video recordings of the presentations can be found here.