On 14 March 2016, a first meeting among a delegation of officials from DG Employment, the European skills/competences, qualifications and occupations (ESCO) secretariat, the Ministry of Labour and ISFOL took place.
ESCO originates within this framework and within the initiative New skills for new jobs, which highlighted the need to develop a common skills language able to create stronger training, education and labour market links. The need for this was confirmed by the recommendation Europe 2020 (A European strategy for smart sustainable and inclusive growth) and by the Educational Council on 13 May 2010. ESCO’s goal is to create a multilingual taxonomic classification and a database of skills/competences, qualifications and occupations, while cooperating with all the stakeholders in labour market management and development. ESCO will be an instrument linking skills/competences, qualifications and occupations and will be made freely available to stakeholders. It can also be integrated with different national, regional and sector-related classification systems, while enabling exchange of information.
An efficient process of information exchange among different systems is essential to implementing ESCO. Fast retrieval, reliability and precision of the information exchanged are key factors for an efficient system, so semantic interoperability will be a fundamental feature of ESCO: semantic interoperability is the ability of two or more computer systems to interpret automatically any information exchanged in an accurate and meaningful way. To achieve this, a common standard for the description of the information in the database is essential for ESCO. In addition to the mapping of the different classification systems, through the adoption of semantic technologies and open formats, it also possible to create applications which can speed up and make automatic job matching procedures more efficient, even among different systems.
