ESCO aims to enhance mobility across Europe by standardizing occupations and skills used in different countries, ensuring transparency and comparability of skills and occupations in Europe. ESCO facilitates an interconnected, digital European labour market by supporting three main broad use cases: job matching and searching, career guidance and learning management, and research and big data analysis of the labour market. In all of these use cases, ESCO serves as a versatile building block for developers, enabling the creation of diverse applications and tools that offer services such as auto-complete, suggestion systems, job search and job matching algorithms, career progression platforms, learning management systems (LMS), skill assessment platforms, occupational mobility apps, and more.
To make ESCO accessible to a wide range of users and allow seamless integration into various services, ESCO is published as Linked Open Data. This means that the data is openly available and interconnected, fostering collaboration and interoperability. The ESCO classification can be accessed through two primary methods:
Download ESCO files
Download ESCO classification files in various formats:
- SKOS-RDF: ttl
- ODS
- CSV
ESCO API
Access ESCO classification through two types of Application Program Interface (API):
- an ESCO web-service API
- an ESCO Local API
Find out more below:
ESCO is published as Linked Open Data (LOD) so it can be easily reused and linked to other data sources.
Using the Linked Open Data method helps users to:
- easily integrate data into their existing IT systems;
- link to other data;
- ensure that the data is well managed and quality-assured before publication;
- ensure that continuously updating the data doesn’t lead to high administrative costs.
ESCO is developed and published using a data model that complies with the following principles:
- A clear scope: each occupation, knowledge, skill and competence in ESCO is clearly established and defined in its description and/or scope note.
- Unique concept identifiers: each occupation, knowledge, skill and competence in ESCO is identified by a string of characters that follows a specific syntax: the URI.
- Backward compatibility: URIs remain consistent over a prolonged period.
ESCO contains language packs, which are published separately, and each dataset is available in 28 (all official EU languages plus Icelandic, Norwegian, Ukrainian, and Arabic). The full list of languages covered by ESCO is:
- Bulgarian (bg)
- Spanish (es)
- Czech (cs)
- Danish (da)
- German (de)
- Estonian (et)
- Greek (el)
- English (en)
- French (fr)
- Irish (ga)
- Croatian (hr)
- Italian (it)
- Latvian (lv)
- Lithuanian (lt)
- Hungarian (hu)
- Maltese (mt)
- Dutch (nl)
- Polish (pl)
- Portuguese (pt)
- Romanian (ro)
- Slovak (sk)
- Slovenian (sl)
- Finnish (fi)
- Swedish (sv)
- Icelandic (is)
- Norwegian (no)
- Arabic (ar)
- Ukrainian (uk)