The ESCO initiative for an European taxonomy of skills, competences and occupations

Abstract

Today jobs are less standardised and homogeneous than in the past. Therefore, a bad or poor representation of the work content (seldom suitable to the actual work contents) can be one of the causes of the current asymmetry between occupational supply and demand. That’s why the European Commission developed a new project for the classification of  European skills/competencies, qualifications and occupations (ESCO). ESCO will create a classification scheme to identify and categorise skills, competences, qualifications and occupations in a standard way, using standard terminology in all EU languages. Information professionals – librarians, record managers etc. – have always dealt with this kind of issues, and thanks to their professional experience will be positively qualified to accomplish this task. The paper briefly describes the launch of the new phase of the ESCO project, that will be concluded in 2017 by producing a multilingual classification scheme of occupations, skills/competences and qualifications available throughout Europe.