ESCO-occupations

ESCO is a common EU classification of occupations and skills, akin to Jobtech Taxonomy. The concepts in ESCO are translated into all official EU languages, aswell as some additional ones such as Arabic, and serve as a hub for interoperability between classifications on a national and European level.

The member states of the EU are bound by the Eures Directive to either create mappings between ESCO and their national occupational and skill structures, or to fully implement ESCO. The main purpose with the mapping is to enrich CVs and job ads sent to EURES with references (URIs) to the concepts in ESCO to which mappings from a national skill or occupation used in the CV or job ad has been created. In Sweden, we chose to map occupation name concepts and skills to corresponding concept types in ESCO. The mappings between the concept structures are made available via Jobtech Taxonomy. Member states' mapping tables are published on the ESCO website.

Occupations in ESCO are structured according to ISCO (International Standard Classification of Occupations), the international standard for classifying occupations. Occupation-name concepts in the Swedish Public Employment Service's classification are structured according to SSYK (Swedish standard for occupational classification), which is based on ISCO.

Concepts in ESCO are identified using persistent URIs, for example: http://data.europa.eu/esco/skill/1605025e-a179-421f-8f35-5b07d182a6b2.

ESCO-occupations in the Taxonomy

The Taxonomy represents all ESCO occupations as their own concepts. Mappings to the Taxonomy occupations are represented as mapping relations according to SKOS. URIs to the ESCO concepts are found through the esco-uri attribute.

The example below shows what such a concept might look like in the Taxonomy. Note that there is an additional attribute to represent URIs (uri). This attribute can be used by external sources to reference concepts within the Taxonomy.

{
    "id": "v2kx_tST_Zy2",
    "preferred_label": "kemist",
    "type": "esco-occupation",
    "esco_uri": "http://data.europa.eu/esco/occupation/0d93706d-32fd-4de3-aa08-be1003e325da",
    "uri": "http://data.jobtechdev.se/taxonomy/concept/v2kx_tST_Zy2"
}

Mappings

The different types of mapping relations can be found in the relations chapter. An ESCO occupation can be mapped towards one or more Taxonomy occupation-name concepts, and vice versa.

The example below shows the ESCO occupation kemist and some of its mappings to occupation-name concepts.

graph TD;
    A(kemist) -->|narrow-match| B(Materialkemist)
    A(kemist) -->|narrow-match| C(Organisk kemist)
    A -->|exact-match| D(Kemist)

Managing the mappings

The mapping has been carried out, and is managed, by the editorial team at the Jobtech Unit within Arbetsförmedlingen.

Due to the fact that all occupation-name concepts need to be mapped to one or more ESCO occupations, new mappings are constantly being added as new occupation-name concepts emerge or become deprecated. Therefore, it is to be expected that each new Taxonomy version will involve some changes in regards to the mappings to some, usually a lesser, extent.

The mappings are determined through manual analysis and with adherance to the ESCO's instructions.

ESCO versions

With each release of a new ESCO version, the upcoming Taxonomy version is updated with any changes to the ESCO skills.

Presently, however, ESCO versions are not explicitly represented in the Taxonomy.

The mapping subsytem can however be used to target specific ESCO versions.

GraphQL examples

The queries below can be tested through our GraphiQL interface.

Get all occupation mappings

query MyQuery {
  concepts(type: "occupation-name") {
    id
    preferred_label
    uri
    type
    broad_match (type: "esco-occupation"){
      id
      preferred_label
      esco_uri
      type
    }
    narrow_match (type: "esco-occupation"){
      id
      preferred_label
      esco_uri
      type
    }
    exact_match (type: "esco-occupation"){
      id
      preferred_label
      esco_uri
      type
    }
    close_match (type: "esco-occupation"){
      id
      preferred_label
      esco_uri
      type
    }
  }
}

JobTech Taxonomy API