ESCO (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations)

ESCO (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations) is a European Commission initiative, run by Directorate General Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion (DG EMPL) that put in place the European multilingual classification of Skills, Competences and Occupations. The main aim of the initiative is to support job mobility across Europe and hence to make labour market more integrated and efficient. EPSO does that by offering a 'common language' on occupations and skills that can be used by different stakeholders on employment and education and training topics.

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 concepts and descriptions can help people to understand:

• what knowledge and skills are usually required when working in a specific occupation.
• what knowledge, skills and competences are obtained as a result of a specific qualification.
• what qualifications are demanded or often requested by employers from those searching for work in a specific occupation.

ESCO provides descriptions of 2942 occupations and 13.485 skills linked to these occupations, translated into 27 languages (all official EU languages plus Icelandic, Norwegian and Arabic), thus providing a huge range of information to citizens across Europe.

ESCO v1.2

In May 2024 the Commission released the new major version of ESCO, based on a data-driven approach which combines human expertise and AI techniques for content creation and quality improvement. This includes leveraging AI to extract information on occupation and skills terms used in online job advertisements, courses and qualifications, national and international classifications of skills and occupations, sectoral publications and analyse them by using customized AI models to identify links with existing ESCO terms.

ESCO v1.2.1 

ESCO v1.2.1 reflects adjustments to translations across languages as well as content-related updates aimed at improving the quality and consistency of concepts. This minor update was developed through a data-driven quality review of the database and feedback on translations provided by Member States. Minor updates of ESCO primarily introduce quality improvements to the taxonomy structure and relationships between different concepts, without adding or removing content from the database.

Key improvements in ESCO v1.2.1 include:

• Updated translations: Review of different language packages based on feedback from Member States authorities. This ensures better multilingual usability of ESCO.
• Removal of duplicates: Repetitions between preferred and alternate labels were removed across all 28 official ESCO languages.
• Quality review of occupations: Links between occupations and skills were revised where excessive numbers of skills were associated with a single occupation. The overall consistency of the classification structure was improved.
• Revision of green skill–occupation relationships: Updates to ESCO green labels and links between green skills and occupations..
• New alternative labels: Adjustments were made to non-preferred English terms and alternative terms across ESCO languages based on Member States’ feedback, addressing cases where no English alternative terms were previously identified.