What is ESCO?
ESCO (European Skills, Competences, Qualifications and Occupations) is a free, public, multilingual classification maintained by the European Commission, describing occupations and the skills and competences associated with each one — built independently of O*NET, and structured differently, even though the two serve a similar purpose.
Where it came from
ESCO is developed and maintained by the European Commission's Directorate-General for Employment. It's built on top of ISCO (the International Standard Classification of Occupations, the UN/ILO's top-level occupational taxonomy) and published in 28 languages, with the goal of giving every EU member state a common reference language for occupations and skills — so a job posting, a qualification, and a jobseeker's CV can all point at the same concept regardless of which country or language they're in.
What's actually in it
For each occupation, ESCO lists the skills and competences associated with it, each tagged essential or optional — a binary relation, not a 1-5 importance score. ESCO's skill catalog is large (over 13,000 skill, competence, and knowledge concepts) and its occupation list is more granular than O*NET's SOC-based one in places, which is part of why it covers roughly three times as many occupations.
How it differs from O*NET
The two classifications don't map onto each other one-to-one. O*NET rates each skill's importance on a 1-5 scale and publishes a Job Zone preparation rating and a RIASEC occupational interest profile per occupation; ESCO instead tags skills essential-or-optional and doesn't publish an equivalent interest profile or preparation-level rating at all. Matching an O*NET occupation to its ESCO equivalents is a judgment call, so we don't guess it: the Atlas uses the official ESCO–O*NET crosswalk (version 1, 2022) published by the ESCO Secretariat with the U.S. Department of Labor, which labels each match exact, close, broader or narrower. An ESCO occupation's profile shows the Job Zone and interests of its best-ranked O*NET match, and says so; see what is O*NET for the other side of that comparison.
How BlissPoint Organization Viewer uses it
We've loaded ESCO's real published classification data — currently 3,039 occupations with 157,901 occupation-skill links across both O*NET and ESCO combined — into the same free, public Occupation Atlas. A company building out its own job architecture can link any role to an ESCO occupation and pull in its essential and optional skills as a starting point for that role's requirements.
This page includes information from the O*NET 31.0 Database by the U.S. Department of Labor, Employment and Training Administration (USDOL/ETA), used under the CC BY 4.0 license; O*NET® is a trademark of USDOL/ETA. ESCO occupations and skills are from the European Commission's ESCO classification, and the occupation crosswalk is the official ESCO–O*NET mapping by the ESCO Secretariat with USDOL/ETA. This service uses the ESCO classification of the European Commission. BlissPoint Analytics has modified all or some of this information: skill, task and descriptor ratings are rounded to one decimal, and ESCO occupations show Job Zone and interests copied from a crosswalked O*NET occupation. USDOL/ETA has not approved, endorsed, or tested these modifications.