On 28th July 2017 the European Commission published the first full version of ESCO, the European Classification of Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations. The classification, available on the ESCO portal, covers 2 942 occupations, 13 485 skills and a growing number of information on qualifications provided by the Member States in 27 languages.
Since then, ESCO has already been used in a number of IT implementations covering a variety of areas like recruiting, matching skills to jobs and trainings, advertising job vacancies, career planning, documenting and mapping skills and qualifications of jobseekers and analysing the labour market. The uptake of ESCO highlights the importance of having a common language to support labour mobility and address communication gaps across countries, by increasing transparency of occupations, qualifications and skills/competences and establishing links between them.
The Commission has been working to ensure the continuous improvement of the classification and to make sure that ESCO is constantly updated to reflect the reality of the labour market and to this end a new version of ESCO will be published in 2021 (ESCO v.1.1). Work for ESCO v.1.1 has already started and the Commission is interested in receiving feedback on the current version of ESCO.
In order to revise the contents of the ESCO classification, the European Commission relies on domain experts who can provide specific expertise on the knowledge, skills and competences needed in specific economic sectors or specific occupations or into cross-sectoral knowledge, skills and competences.
To facilitate the communication with stakeholders the Commission is therefore launching the ESCO community forum for domain experts, a collaborative space designed to facilitate the interaction, communication and exchange of information between the ESCO Secretariat and experts from the labour market and the domain of education and training.
The forum offers a single place where to share comments and feedback on the content of the classification, exchange best practices and experiences on how to use ESCO and propose new ideas to further improve ESCO. It allows stakeholders to engage in active discussions around ESCO on the skills and competences needed for a specific occupation or across sectors, to signal any modification in the nature of an occupation and on the skills associated to it and to propose new occupations, skills and competences that are not part of ESCO.
The Commission invites stakeholders to join the ESCO community forum for domain experts. Each member of forum should have expertise in the terminology and structure of occupations, skills/competences and/or qualifications in the specific sector. The forum is accessible from the following link:https://ec.europa.eu/esco/forum/
Our feeling is that EurEta is an obvious stakeholder for the above. Our Executive Board will discuss on the optimal way to make our voice heard!