ESCO: European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations

ESCO Classification

The European Commission’s multilingual classification of skills, competences, qualifications, and occupations. Functions as a reference taxonomy enabling interoperability across national classification systems, job platforms, and education/training frameworks.

Core Structure

Two-pillar architecture:

• Occupations pillar: Approximately 3,000 occupation concepts organized hierarchically, each mapped to ISCO-08 (International Standard Classification of Occupations)
• Skills pillar: Approximately 13,890 skill/knowledge concepts with four-tier reusability levels

Qualifications: Aggregated from national qualifications frameworks, linked to EQF levels

Key Design Patterns

1. Skill reusability levels: Transversal → Cross-sector → Sector-specific → Occupation-specific
2. Essential vs. Optional relationships: Skills connected to occupations with relationship typing
3. Preferred/non-preferred terms: Multilingual controlled vocabulary (28 languages) with synonyms, variants
4. SKOS-based ontology: Linked Open Data using Simple Knowledge Organisation System

Notable Approaches

• Extends existing international standard (ISCO-08) rather than replacing it
• Uses machine learning (XLM-RoBERTa) for taxonomy maintenance and mapping assistance
• Top-down expert design validated against bottom-up labor market data (job ads and CVs)
• Skill contextualization/decontextualization methodology for abstraction levels

Extracted Content

• 06-atom—skill-reusability-spectrum
• 06-atom—essential-vs-optional-skill-relationships
• 02-atom—reference-taxonomy-pattern
• 06-atom—multilingual-controlled-vocabulary
• 06-molecule—representation-learning-for-taxonomy-maintenance