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Information points report
Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion 20th ESCO Maintenance Committee– Information points report
March 2016 2
ESCO (2016) SEC FINAL
Document Date: 20/06/2016
Last update: 04/07/2016
Table of Contents
Table of Contents .............................................................................................. 2 Purpose of this document ................................................................................... 3 EURES decision on the use of NACE rev2 on the EURES-platform ............................. 4
Background information ................................................................................... 4 EURES decision and next steps ......................................................................... 4
Second meeting of the Member States Working Group on ESCO (MSWG) ................. 5 Background information ................................................................................... 5 Current status ................................................................................................ 5 Next steps ..................................................................................................... 6
Note on the ESCO consultation by the Member States working group on ESCO .......... 7 Purpose of this note ........................................................................................ 7 Context ......................................................................................................... 7 Next steps ..................................................................................................... 7
Briefing on the results of the skills clean-up .......................................................... 9 Briefing on the status of the ESCO translation work ..............................................10 Request for information on specific ESCO occupations ...........................................11
Background ...................................................................................................11 Is there a need for a generic occupation of project manager ...............................11 Welding occupations in ESCO v1 ......................................................................11 The need to include the associate professional nurse in ESCO .............................12 Do OCCs such as pharmacologist, toxicologist or chemist could be subsets of
biologist? ......................................................................................................12 Differences between chemist and biologist ........................................................13 Should herbalist appear as a separate occupation?.............................................14 The completeness of the list of OCCs related to airport construction .....................14 The completeness of the list of OCCs related to teacher's trainers ........................14 The completeness of the metal industry in ESCO v1 ...........................................14 Why OCCs such as magician and singer were rejected whereas choreographer was
accepted .......................................................................................................15 Qualifications pilot ............................................................................................16
Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion 20th ESCO Maintenance Committee– Information points report
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Purpose of this document The purpose of this document is to inform the ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI) on
Commission action following their advice on ESCO and on recent developments on the
ESCO project.
The ESCO Secretariat (SEC) will not provide formal presentations on the topics
covered in this document. The SEC kindly invites the MAI members to submit
questions via e-mail before the meeting. The SEC will collect the questions and report
on them in the meeting.
Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion 20th ESCO Maintenance Committee– Information points report
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EURES decision on the use of NACE rev2 on the EURES-platform Relevant for Day 1
Background information
In the 18th and 19th ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI) meetings, the ESCO
Secretariat (SEC) asked the MAI members’ advice on mapping the ESCO occupations
to the NACE rev2 (from here onwards ‘NACE’) sectors of economic activity.
However, the MAI members expressed the following concerns:
- NACE is a statistical classification and was not developed for job matching;
- Many occupations cut across several economic sectors, making the search
results too broad;
- Filtering jobs by economic sectors could hide job vacancies and hinder job
mobility.
EURES decision and next steps
Following the advice of the MAI, the ESCO team re-discussed the use of the NACE
classification with the EURES team. EURES stated that a mapping to NACE is a clear
business requirement from their side. The EURES Job Mobility Portal intends to use
NACE to provide users with an additional way to search for occupations. Many workers
and jobseekers build their career on sectoral expertise, and using NACE in search and
matching would allow them to filter the job vacancies for sectors or areas of economic
activity. In fact, previous users’ feedback suggests the added value of providing this
additional filtering mechanism that will be controlled by the users themselves.
We are therefore currently working on a methodology to develop a mapping between
ESCO and NACE. To this end, we will take contact with Member States that already
have experience with creating a mapping between occupational and skills
classifications in order to learn from their experience, e.g.:
Slovakia (SK NACE)
Spain (Clasificación Nacional de Actividades Económicas)
Italy (ATECO)
France (ROME v3 – NAF)
The SEC will present this methodology at the next MAI meeting and will ask for the
members’ advice.
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Second meeting of the Member States Working Group on ESCO (MSWG) Relevant for Day 1 and Day 2
Background information
The Member States working group on ESCO (MSWG) is composed by representatives
of Member States' authorities on labour market and education and training plus
European social partners. Its aim is to support the Commission on the development
and implementation of ESCO at national level, including in its links with the recent
updated EURES Regulation. The ESCO Secretariat (SEC) has been regularly informing
the ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI) on MSWG's activities and meetings.
Current status
The second meeting of the MSWG took place in Brussels on 26 April 2016.
Representatives of 24 Member States (MS) (all EU MS except EL, BG, IE and NL)
attended the meeting. Some MS were represented by their permanent representatives
in Brussels instead of the official nominated representatives, due mainly to travel
restrictions linked to the Brussels terrorist attacks at the time of the meeting. The
meeting was held in a constructive and positive atmosphere.
The three main goals of this second MSWG meeting were: a) to inform MS about the
New Skills Agenda for Europe and the role of ESCO in it; b) to provide an overview of
the latest developments of the ESCO project, namely process and calendar, country
visits, translations, the pilot projects and the communication strategy and c) to invite
the MSWG to give general feedback on ESCO version 1 (v1) and its translation into the
24 EU official languages.
Main outcomes of the meeting were:
More information was required by several members of the group on the
new governance scheme currently being proposed by the Commission for
the future management of all European tools related to skills and qualifications.
The request for information focused on the role and place of the MSWG in a
future Coordination group for skills and qualifications, as well as with other
existing groups such as the ACVT, the possible legal basis for the new Group,
and how to involve stakeholders and social partners in the development of the
new group.
The group reacted positively to the Commission's suggestion for the
members of the group to review the general features of the ESCO classification
and its linguistic accuracy. Some members of the group would like to associate
the national EURES units/PES to this consultation. More details on the
consultation were asked, in particular its calendar, methodology and how the
input of the group would be integrated in ESCO's development. The provisional
calendar presented by the Commission for this consultation by the MSWG was
Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion 20th ESCO Maintenance Committee– Information points report
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end of July for general feedback on the English version of ESCO v1 and
November/December for the translated versions of v1.
The group expressed some concerns about the timing being proposed by
the Commission for the translation of the ESCO content into 23 official
languages and its compatibility with the expected time frame for the
publication of ESCO version 1 (expected end 2016). DG Translation will conduct
the translation work. The group reacted positively to the Commission
suggestion on involving national experts on classifications to support DG
Translation on acute technical points of this translation work.
The group approved the ESCO's Communication strategy presented by
the Commission at the meeting. However the group would like that this general
strategy is complemented by concrete communication activities in a near
future.
Next steps
The next meeting of the group is planned for 26 September 2016 (tbc). The main
point of the agenda will be ESCO's consultation process by the MSWG.
Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion 20th ESCO Maintenance Committee– Information points report
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Note on the ESCO consultation by the Member States working group on ESCO Relevant for Day 1 and Day 2
Purpose of this note
The purpose of this note is to inform the ESCO Board (BOA) and the ESCO
Maintenance Committee (MAI) on the consultation on ESCO v1 that the Commission is
undertaking with the Member States through the Member States Working Group on
ESCO (MSWG) during Q3 & Q4 2016. In the documents package for this meeting, the
members of the Board and the MAI will find the Commission's document "Point 2 b):
Review of ESCO by the MSWG". This document was distributed to the MSWG for
discussion on their meeting of 26 April 20161 and it explains the aims of and
procedure for the aforementioned consultation.
Context
The mission of the MSWG is to advise and support the Commission on the
implementation and development of ESCO and to ensure its interoperability with the
national classification systems on employment. A timely knowledge and evaluation of
v1 by the MSWG members will help to anticipate any potential ESCO implementation
issues and enable a smooth use of ESCO in the future.
The goal of this consultation is not to review ESCO's content (other quality assurance
mechanism are in place for this) but to give the Commission informal and general
feedback from the Member States on the ESCO classification as a whole, its
terminological richness, how it compares to other similar international classifications
such as ISCO 08 and in particular on its adequacy to map to national classifications.
The consultation should notably contribute to support the Implementing Acts
according to art. 19 (2) of Regulation 2016/589/EU (EURES Regulation), aiming at
backing up the periodical mapping of national classifications to ESCO.
Members of the MSWG can be supported on their assessment by any other colleagues
and/or stakeholders (PES, experts etc.) they deem important to involve in it.
Next steps
The consultation will be done on line2 and will be divided in two phases:
1-First phase: Consultation on the general overview of ESCO content.
The MSWG will have the opportunity to review the English version of ESCO v1 from 29
June to 1 September 2016. The consultation focus exclusively on ESCO's occupation
and knowledge, skills and competence pillars. Due to its different development
process the qualifications pillar will not be included in this process.
2- Second phase: Consultation on the different language versions of ESCO
In the last quarter of 2016, the Commission expects to have ready the final version of
ESCO's occupations and skills/competences pillars in all official EU languages. This
1 The minutes of the MSWG meeting on 26 April 2016 were sent to the Board and the
MAI on 27 June last. 2 The consultation will be done by using the link http://prerelease.escoportal.eu.
Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion 20th ESCO Maintenance Committee– Information points report
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second phase of the consultation will focus only on ESCO's linguistic accuracy.
MSWG's members would have a four weeks period to asses this content.
MSWG's members can send their feedback and comments by written format for both
consultation phases to the ESCO Secretariat. The Commission will evaluate these
comments and feedback and implement pertinent improvements in the final stages of
the ESCO development.
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Briefing on the results of the skills clean-up Relevant for Day 1
As part of the quality assurance of the ESCO occupation profiles, the Taxonomy Expert
Group (TEG) carried out a four step clean-up process of the knowledge, skills and
competences (from now on mentioned as “skills”).
The ESCO Secretariat (SEC) discussed this process with the ESCO Maintenance
Committee (MAI) during the 16th and 18th meetings. The process is summarised below
before providing the main results:
1. Split of skills
The TEG identified skill concepts which consisted of more than one action verb and
divided the concept in two to ensure one action verb per concept (e.g. the skill
‘prepare and serve drinks’ would be split into ‘prepare drinks’ and ‘serve drinks’)
2. Contextualisation
Originally the Secretariat and the TEG linked transversal skills (e.g. “work in teams”)
directly to the occupation profiles.
However, the ESCO Maintenance Committee advised the Secretariat that this would
not be useful. Due to the generic character of the transversal skills, which makes them
applicable to almost every occupation, this would create fuzziness in the job matching
results.
As a consequence, the Secretariat decided to describe the transversal skills in the
context of specific occupations. In practice, every time that the Secretariat and TEG
needed to link an occupation to a transversal skill, they created a new skill on the
basis of the question: how does the transversal skill translate in the context of this
occupation? For example, how does the transversal skill “report facts” apply to an
“explosives engineer”? In this case the Secretariat and the TEG created the new skill
“report outcome of blast”.
3. Creation of relations among skills
The TEG identified several skills as being duplicates, synonyms, or closely related. In
order to record these cases and make them transparent, they created relations
between these skills and qualified them as “same as”, “similar” or “broader/narrower”.
This supported the following step (merging of skills) and will further support the
creation of skills collections.
4. Merge of skills
The TEG identified the skills that they considered to be equal in scope with the “same
as” relation. The following step was then to merge these skills.
The clean-up process resulted in the following outcomes:
Process Amount of skills
Split skills 493
Contextualised skills 2732
Merged skills 431
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Briefing on the status of the ESCO translation work Relevant for Day 1
During the 19th ESCO Maintenance Committee (MAI) meeting, the MAI members
discussed the ESCO translation process and provided the following advice to the
Commission:
- The Commission should ensure that translations are quality assessed before
the release;
- The Commission could consider validation of the translations by the respective
public employment services as a "plan B";
- The Commission should launch the translation after the gap analysis so that
national occupation classifications can facilitate the translation process;
- The Commission should review the timing given the high complexity of the
translations task.
Following this discussion, we re-discussed the translation process with DG Translation,
the Commission's service for translation. Together, we also reviewed the experience
with the translation pilot project. To support DG Translation in the upcoming
translation project, we took the following measures which are taking into account the
advice of the MAI:
- The Commission invited Member States through the Member States Working
Group (MSWG) to provide contact information for national experts as well as
their national occupational classification in order to facilitate the translation
process by DG Translation. So far, 17 countries (including non-Member States)
provided us with contacts and 6 with their national occupational classification.
- Through the MSWG the Commission will also consult Member States on the
results of the translations. This will allow covering all official languages and it
will allow each Member State to involve the appropriate entity of their national
administration (e.g. the public employment service).
- The Commission will not launch the translation work before finalisation of the
gap analysis.
- The Commission reviewed the timeline in light of these additional quality
assessment steps and will allow an additional two months to finalise the
translation work.
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Request for information on specific ESCO occupations Relevant for Day 1
Background
This section aims at replying to specific questions that the ESCO Maintenance
Committee (MAI) members raised during the 19th MAI meeting on some occupations.
Is there a need for a generic occupation of project manager
There are two reasons why ‘project manager’ features in ESCO as a generic
occupation:
The first reason is that project manager is an occupation that ranges across all
industries and the only thing that varies is the context of the job (e.g. project
manager in construction projects, IT projects). Nevertheless, the basis of the
occupation remains the same. The differences across jobsappear in the optional
skills of the occupation.
The second reason is the primary hierarchy, which requires of occupations of a
general nature to create the hierarchy based on ISCO.
Welding occupations in ESCO v1
Following the request of Mr David Hunter during the 19th MAI meeting, the ESCO
Secretariat (SEC) investigated how to better reflect the field of welding for ESCO v1.
The SEC consulted the European Federation for Welding, Joining and Cutting (EWF)
and remodelled the field of welding in ESCO in line with the information sources EWF
provides on their website3.
The SEC reduced the total number of welding occupations from fifteen to seven. ESCO
v1 now contains 3 broader welding occupations: ‘welder’, ‘welding inspector’ and
‘welding coordinator’. Based on a labour market check, the SEC added the in ESCO
already existing specialised welders4, e.g. ‘spot welder’, as specialisations to the
‘welder’. Fig. 1: Welding occupations in ESCO v1
3 EWF website: http://www.ewf.be/qualification.aspx 4 Welders specialised in specific welding techniques.
Employment, Social Affairs & Inclusion 20th ESCO Maintenance Committee– Information points report
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The SEC merged six welder specialisations referring to other context than welding
techniques, e.g. a sector or group of products, into the broader ‘welder’.
The need to include the associate professional nurse in ESCO
We researched about ‘health care assistant’ and ‘assistant nurse’. As a conclusion, it is
possible to state that, both work as part of nursing teams but their differences come
down to qualifications and studies. While the assistant nurse is a nurse, the healthcare
assistant is not.
Healthcare assistants assist the nurses and provide basic support to patients.
The sources bellow delineate their roles and differences. It also established that
in order to obtain the title, an assistant nurse studies for a longer period than
the healthcare assistant.
https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/explore-roles/clinical-support-
staff/healthcare-assistant
https://www.rcn.org.uk/professional-development/become-an-hca-ap
https://nationalcareersservice.direct.gov.uk/advice/planning/jobprofiles/Pages/
healthcareassistant.aspx
Nurse assistants provide nursing care. They are not full nurses but do provide
similar care to healthcare assistants, with a few extra roles it seems like.
Do OCCs such as pharmacologist, toxicologist or chemist could be subsets of biologist?
The sub sector life science research of SCIE contains the following OCCs:
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Toxicologist
Physiologist
Pharmacologist
Microbiologist
Kinesiologist
Immunologist
Geneticist
Epidemiologist
Biochemist
Biometrician
Biologist
All these OCCs share the same ISCO-08 code, which is: 2131 – Biologist, botanists,
zoologists and related professionals. These OCCs have been developed as stand-alone
OCCs for the following reason: there is a distinction between the biology field and the
biologist OCC. The former is the scientific field to which the OCCs in question belong,
while they also belong to other fields because they overlap. The latter term, the
biologist OCC, is one of those OCCs that belong to the biology field, but it does not
mean that a biologist encompasses all fields of biology nor that other OCCs should be
considered as narrower nor equivalent to the biologist. OCCs, such as toxicologist and
biochemist are multidisciplinary, i.e. they belong not only to a branch of biology but
also to other scientific branches, such as chemistry and medicine. As a result, they are
specialised which makes these OCCs be stand-alone.
Pharmacologist and biochemist are listed as OCC examples in ISCO under 2131 as well
as in several of the NOCs the SEC used for the gap analysis.
Differences between chemist and biologist
They are two distinct OCCs, which is justified by the descriptions of each OCC and the
different ISCO unit group to which they belong:
Chemist (ISCO 2113 Chemists): Chemists perform laboratory research by testing
and analysing the chemical structure of substances. They translate the research
results into industrial production processes which are further used in the development
or improvement of products. Chemists are also testing the quality of the manufactured
products and their environmental impact.
Biologist (ISCO 2131 Biologists, Botanists, Zoologists and Related
Professionals): Biologists study living organisms and life in its large extent in
combination with their environment. They strive, by means of their research, to
explain the functioning mechanisms employed by organisms, their interactions, and
their evolution.
Scope note: Includes people performing medical research, biotechnology,
biochemistry, pharmaceutical research.
Biochemist (OCC example under ISCO 2131 Biologists, Botanists, Zoologists
and Related Professionals): Biochemists study and perform research on the
reactions caused by chemicals in living organisms. This includes performing research
for the development or improvement of chemical-based products (e.g. medicine)
aiming to improve the health of living organisms, as well as, to better understand their
reactions.
This is a multidisciplinary OCC, i.e. it belongs not only to a branch of biology but also
to another scientific branch (chemistry). As a result, it is specialised which makes this
OCCs be stand-alone.
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Should herbalist appear as a separate occupation?
We created the herbal therapist prior to OCP when trying to identify the most relevant
complementary medicine OCCs. As it is possible to find herbalist vacancies, this OCC
was kept.
The completeness of the list of OCCs related to airport construction
The following points refer to OCCs related to airport construction:
The general managing of the airport construction is done by a ‘construction
general contractor’, called in ESCO ‘construction manager’ (this OCC was added
after the gap analysis).
The work related to the laying or putting runways, is mostly done by ‘road
roller operators’, which can be found in CONS.
For further information about the airport OCCs, it is possible to refer to the TRANS
sector which has such OCC under the OCCs group of ‘air transport’.
The completeness of the list of OCCs related to teacher's trainers
After further research, the SEC decided not to include this OCC, proposed in the
context of the OCP, as trainers are often experienced teachers, so the OCC is already
represented in the classification. Moreover, the gap analysis confirmed the decision
not to include ‘teacher’s trainer’ as new OCC.
The completeness of the metal industry in ESCO v1
ESCO v1 covers both basic metal production as the manufacturing of various metal
products. The SEC validated the coverage of the metal sector in ESCO in 2 manners:
1. through the ESCO Online Consultation, and
2. by performing a thorough gap-analysis with eight National Occupational
Classifications.
The SEC involved approximately 150 experts during the ESCO Online Consultation to
review the content related to the manufacturing of various metal products5. Following
expert feedback during the ESCO Online Consultation, the SEC created 10 new
occupations in the metal industry.
During the gap analysis, the SEC compared the content of ESCO with eight National
Occupational Classifications. The SEC identified six gaps for the metal industry, thus
created six additional occupations.
Taking the expert input and the outcome of the gap analysis into account, the SEC is
assured that the metal industry is well covered in ESCO v1.
5 The field of basic metal production is covered by the Sectoral Reference Group
‘Mining and heavy industry’ and its content was already final early 2015.
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March 2016 15
Why OCCs such as magician and singer were rejected whereas
choreographer was accepted
Magician is not a preferred-term, while singer is, as said, so is choreographer.
Historically, in late 2014, it was suggested to move magician to the subsector of
performance artists. In February 2015, further work was done by experts representing
circus schools. As a result, magician is now listed as a non-preferred term of variety
artist. ‘Street magician’ is a non-preferred term to the street performer. Elements
referring to magic tricks also appear in the description linked to stand-up comedian.
Singer constitutes a preferred-term and is a different occupation than musician. The
split occurred in November 2014 and was maintained after that date.
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Qualifications pilot Relevant for Day 1 and Day 2
The ESCO Secretariat (SEC) carried out, between November 2015 and March 2016, a
pilot project to test the qualifications metadata schema6. This pilot was supported by
the ISA7 programme and was done in cooperation with DG Informatics.
The main objectives of the pilot were to demonstrate:
The added value of publishing information about qualifications according to a
common language, the qualifications metadata schema included in the call for
proposals of 2015, to create or upgrade national qualifications databases and
link them to European portals;
That distributed information about qualifications can be aggregated if based on
a common schema;
How these aggregated metadata about qualifications can be further exploited.
How these metadata can be presented in a uniform way.
For the purposes of the pilot, the SEC received information on qualifications from three
different sources:
- Spain (Ministry of Education, Culture and Sports) and Sweden (National Agency
for Higher Vocational Education) to test the indirect inclusion to ESCO;
- Microsoft (learning department), to test the direct inclusion to ESCO.
The pilot tested two simple use cases: “search and view qualifications” (based on
label, EQF level, ISCED-F field and country) and “find related qualifications” (based on
the EQF level and/or the ISCED-F field).
The data was collected and published following the common qualifications schema in a
website where a user can search and view all the loaded qualifications in a
standardized way. The pilot website was presented to the participant stakeholders
(Sweden, Spain and Microsoft), as well as to the ESCO BOA and the ESCO MSWG. It
received positive feedback from them and its current version was updated based on
the received comments.
The Commission is currently considering doing a second phase of the qualifications
pilot project in order to cover additional topics, such as semi-automated extraction of
Learning Outcomes, use of ESCO skills as Learning Outcomes or decentralised
publication of information.
6 https://ec.europa.eu/esco/portal/escopedia/The_ESCO_Qualifications_Pillar
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